Letter re $300 dollars increase in pension

January 9, 2009

Dear Editor,

We appreciate the fact that the Minister of Finance has realized the need to increase the old age pension and has sought to do so. However, an increase of $300 is totally inadequate. It brings the pension to $6300 a month. Who could live on $ 6300 a month? We know that in addition to the pension , old age pensioners are provided useful help with water and electricity. But $6300 is not even enough to buy food for a month, let alone address essential needs other than water and electricity.

Look at the monthly expenses provided to us in 2008 by a 67 year old pensioner who has a kitchen garden, a cow from which she gets milk sometimes and a calf. Rent is not a cost for her since she lives in her own house.

Food $ 4, 200
Kerosene $ 800
Electricity $ 339
Potable water $ 500
Feed (for cows) $ 3,000
Molasses (for cows) $300
Total $9, 139

This old age pensioner’s budget is completely catch-as-catch-can. She counts only $4,200 for food because she doesn’t cook every day and when she does she mainly cooks breakfast and dinner and depends on friends for lunch when they can help. The budget lists nothing for transport, clothes, or anything that can be called “extras”, like a leisure time “treat”. It has nothing for repairs to the house. She has diabetes and is hypertensive, but the budget does not include the cost of medication ($3000) which she has to meet when the clinic doesn’t have any; this does not happen regularly, but it does happen.

Remember that the expenses she listed , which amounted to $3000 a month more than the then old age pension, related to 2008. But food prices increased by more than 10% in 2008 – 14.7% from June 2007 to June 2008; 8.9% from December 2007 to June 2008. Therefore with the 5% increase, pensioners will not be able to buy as much as they could last year. They are worse off.

We all know that some pensioners survive on additional assistance from relatives and friends locally and overseas. The pensioner whose budget we’ve described gets $2000 from one of her daughters when she can afford it, maybe once every two to three months. What about those who have no other means of getting additional assistance? What should they do to offset their other expenses? Some of them have ailments which call for having someone to care for them. How are they to pay for that service when the money they are receiving cannot even feed them?

Some pensioners are spending a considerable part of their pension money paying for transportation to get to and from the post offices to access the pension.

Over and over again we have heard the Minister of Human Services say “We are a poor country”, as if to explain why we can’t do more to increase the incomes of the poorest women and men in our society. This Minister does other good work which we have supported but on this we can’t back her, not one inch.

We in Red Thread have made this point before - that the government only talks about what they call the national economy and the “cost to the national economy”. They are very short-sighted in counting that cost. When a household doesn’t have enough to meet its needs, something has to suffer – health, the children’s education, time and energy to provide adequate care for the children and other family members who need it, stress, most often that of the women who are the main caregivers and managers of households with inadequate incomes. The more these things are neglected at household level, the more they have to be dealt with ONE WAY OR ANOTHER by the whole society.

Old age pension is not a favour to be granted. It is an entitlement. And it must be enough for old age pensioners to live. Let the far too many advisers in the Office of the President with the far too many perks they receive live for one month on an old age pension.

Yours sincerely,
Joy Marcus
On behalf of Red Thread