News

GRT Members – Proposed OMERS Pension Plan Changes

To all Local 4304 members at GRT,

As many of you have already know, OMERS is proposing to make changes to our pension plan at a coming OMERS Board of Directors meeting on November 15th, an article in the most recent edition of the uXpress, our Local’s newsletter, touched on this subject.  These proposed changes will negatively affect not only our members, but municipal employees across the province of Ontario.  Unifor National has set up a campaign and petition to tell the OMERS Board of Directors to vote to reject the proposed changes.  We all need to speak up as these proposed changes will  affect us all.  Please visit the linked websites, read about the proposed changes and sign the petition to tell OMERS to leave our pension alone.

The following information was provided by National for all our members:

In a nutshell, four of the 6 possible changes would impact negatively our members’ pensions under OMERS:

1. Replace guaranteed indexing with conditional indexing for future pensions (prospectively only providing PCOLA in future years if the condition of the plan in terms of funded status permits)

2. Integrate the pension formula with the new “Year’s Additional Maximum Pensionable Earnings” (YAMPE) introduced as part of the enhanced Canada Pension Plan (CPP) (lower accrual rate on those earnings)

3. Update the criteria for early retirement subsidies (this would limit the ‘subsidy’ for early unreduced pensions under the plan, i.e., no early unreduced pension before reaching age 60)

4. Eliminate the current 35-year service cap (done in tandem with limiting the early retirement subsidies to encourage longer work careers for those hired before age 25).

OMERS is voting on November 15, 2018 on a number of proposed pension plan changes including reducing the opportunities for early unreduced retirement. We need your support to share this campaign link with the Unit Chair at such workplaces to encourage them to distribute to Unifor members in their workplace that are OMERS plan members.

Please encourage folks to visit the Unifor OMERS campaign at http://www.unifor.org/omers and to send a letter to OMERS in the form of the petition at http://petition.web.net/unifor/node/93. Please visit the links for this campaign in English (French to follow tomorrow) on the main Campaigns page at https://www.unifor.org/en/take-action/campaigns.

We have developed this campaign website to link members to this online petition that can be sent to OMERS. Together, we can have an impact by encouraging Unifor members to engage and share their concerns with the proposed changes being decided on November 15th, 2018 at the OMERS Sponsor Corporation board meeting