Given the poor performance in investment markets recently, you might be thinking that this January will be another one of those without any pension increase. You would be wrong! A few years ago, the 5 year 'memory' in our indexing formula hurt us as losing years from early in this century entered the formula. Now, the strong performance in the last few years will help us in spite of the bad performance this year. My expectation is that for the year 2007/08 the return, after expenses, will be on the order of -4.0%. That is, a 4% loss. However when we couple this with the previous 4 positive years of returns, and calculate the excess returns (over 4.5%) there should be about 3.6% available for indexing. Inflation over the relevant period will be less than this so, in fact, there will be some catch up come January 1. Those of you who have lost out on pension increases in the past few years will make up some of those losses. I will provide more detail on this after the mid-November meeting of the Pension Trust Committee at which we will receive the audited calculations of the rate of return after expenses.

Les Robb
MURA Representative on the Pension Trust Committee