Strewth

I have until Friday this week to decide whether to take the offer from my Company of early retirement. They have had an early retirement window open for two weeks now and the option to leave on 5th February has been offered to me.

The changes being proposed are well documented in the public domain, and as far as I am concerned I would have needed to work until I was 62 to reap the benefits of retirement which I am being offered now. A no brainer you would think?

And so did I until an update was issued last week. Now I have had some knocks on this blogger with regard to punctuation and proof reading, but if ever an e-mail needed another e-mail to explain the first one, then this update did. It clearly was not thought through or tested out on a peer group so now the whole Company are charging round saying, do you know what this means? Do you think this applies? and getting several different answers.

As far as I am concerned it gives me a lifeline, in as much as it looks like I can work through to 60 now to get the pension I had previously budgeted for, or, in the interim, leave when I want to on terms I have time to think through. Well, at least, that's what I think it says.

It is endemic at the moment though that employers are wielding the axe wherever there is opportunity to cut costs. Vauxhall Motors up here in Ellesmere Port are still to be absolutely black and white when laying out their employment/redundancy plans. The 8000 Corus employees who have just learnt they are to be laid off had expected a better and longer stay of execution when the firm was sold a few years ago.

Then at the other end of the scale, the City bankers, many of whom would not be in a job but for the government bailing them out, are now bleating about the threat to their bonus schemes. A draconian tax on banking bonuses would be a brave move , but there are many people in the non-high street banking sector who would suffer unjustly. On many fronts, watch this space.