A Modest Proposal

Full pensions for all at age 70

With India cited as an example, a modest proposal has been made that colleagues who elected to take a lump sum on retirement, and thus to be satisfied with a reduced pension, should be entitled to a full pension after 10 years. By that time, the U.N. Joint Staff Pension Fund would have recovered what it disbursed in the lump sums, and thus should restore full pensions to them, suggests M.L. Sharma, formerly UNICEF, New Delhi.

“I believe there are a number of sovereign states (unnamed, unfortunately), including India, which, on retirement. let their employees commute up to one third and then restore full pension after 10 to 12 years. It would be worthwhile for staff and former staff associations to pursue this point for consideration by the United Nations,” he says in link, the pensioners’ newsletter for the UNICEF Pension Group, India.

Retiring after 30 years of service, in December 1982, our colleague in common with many others elected to take a one-third lump sum payment, which effectively reduced his pension by a third. Through paying out just twothirds of the full amount permitted, he reckons that the pension fund had by December 1993 recovered the $73,451 that he had received as lump sum. From that date to Deœmber 1997, according to his calculations, he has received $34,373 less than what he would have had with a full pension.

That has led the newsletter to the acid conclusion that the “one-third option is a profit-making device for the pension fund,” and especially in times of preventive medicine (with WHO preaches) good food and housing, ail of which lead to longer lives.

Despite the lament that “we become losers in cases where we had availed ourselves of the one-third option,” there is less concern on the part of our UNICEF colleague with the pros and cons of the commutation. Rather, the greater emphasis is placed, as it should be, on the proposal he modestly puts forward that all of us who make it to our seventies should receive a full pension.

QuarterIy News of the Association of Former WHO Staff,

(January-March 2001/2).