Well I thought I understood it, but given your last answer, I‘m now not sure I have understood you, or perhaps vice versa.
That depends what you mean by “employer subsidy”. If you mean “employer’s contributions” then yes they are higher for the older pension schemes, but not much. But that has no impact on what individuals get paid.
I don’t understand what yiu mean by differential pay being ‘permitted’ by the unions. In the signalling grades, all signallers at Grade “x” get paid the same. Again, for clarity, what their pension contributions are is completely irrelevant to it.
Not so. Individual’s Pension contributions are not taken into account in pay discussions. In fact Idoubt whether any HR / Finance manager would know what particualr section of the pension scheme any individual is in.
At an individual level, no. But surely when Network Rail make a 'global' offer of an average 3% uplift (or whatever) the finance team has worked out what this is going to cost, and in doing so they have taken into account the cost to the business not just of headline salary but also also their ongoing contributions to all the pension schemes.
If everyone were on the new pension scheme, they would have to contribute less to the pension schemes in cumulo and so perhaps they would be able to offer 3.5% instead. If everyone had been on the old pension scheme, they would have had to contribute more to the pension schemes so perhaps they would have been only able to offer 2.5%.
Whether the effect is 1% I've no idea, I'm just using round numbers.
In that sense younger workers are getting a less attractive offer than they would have done otherwise due to older workers getting a better deal, while the older workers are getting a more attractive offer than they would have done otherwise due to the younger workers getting a worse deal. This is the sense in which this subsidy exists.
