The imagination of the bosses knows no limit when it comes to cutting wages. After the wage cuts due to short-time working and down days in countless companies, they are now targeting the pensions of their workforces - which really amounts to another form of wage cut.
True, this is not entirely new. Hundreds of companies have already switched their previous collective final salary funds to individual pension schemes, which require higher employee contributions while allowing employers to reduce their own contributions. Worst of all, not only do these schemes pay lower pensions, but they shift all the risk linked to the ups and downs of the financial markets onto the future pensioners.
Now companies are beginning to use the crisis as a pretext to reduce their contributions to pension schemes while demanding that workers should increase theirs. This is what is happening, for instance, at Aon, one of the world's largest insurance brokers, which employs 36,000 workers worldwide and 5,000 in Britain. Using the pretext of the crisis, Aon has now announced that it will cut its pension contributions by up to 50%.
The bosses' game: heads they win, tails we lose
Indeed, this is exactly the way the bosses are trying to play it with our pensions. What Aon has decided to do is quite simply to take a partial pension contribution "holiday" at workers' expense! Only this time, unlike the contribution holidays they took in the past, they justify it by the poor state of financial markets!
But how many billions of pounds have the bosses made on our backs, during the decades up to 2001 or so, when most were taking contribution holidays already? Only, at the time, their pretext was that pension funds had a surplus due to the meteoric rise of share prices on the stock market.
They could have used that surplus to strengthen the pension funds, in preparation for a likely crash that everyone knew would happen at some point. And they could have used it to improve the lot of existing and future pensioners. But they did neither. Instead, they just stopped paying into the funds, when they did not purely and simply cream off the alleged surplus to keep their shareholders happy and inflate their already fat salaries.
And now that their crazy bingo machine is backfiring on them (and on us) due to their profiteering, they expect us to pay yet again, this time to cover the deficits they created themselves and to help them to keep dividends flowing into their shareholders' pockets! But why should we give away one more penny of our inadequate wages to bail them out? This is just unacceptable!
Time to restart from a clean sheet
On the contrary, in view of the catastrophic damage caused by their financial havoc, isn't it time to rethink all these schemes? After all, aren't the capitalists and their politicians producing an enormous amount of hot air claiming that they want to "regulate" their unworkable system?
For generations, the working class of this country has been lured into thinking that a "wisely invested pension pot" was the best way to build up a decent pension. But we all know that this was always nonsense.
Because of the explosion of casualisation and the huge numbers of non-jobs, a large number of workers will be unable to survive on their pensions when they retire. But even those who have been lucky enough to have regular employment in a big company for a large part of their working lives are no longer guaranteed to have the pension they thought they were saving for.
Pensions are the only means of survival for millions. They should not be left to the speculators' greed - not even under the supervision of the state, as the planned pension reform to be phased in from 2012 intends to do. Because, as was shown only too clearly over the past year, the state is just as incapable of containing speculation in this capitalist world as it is of predicting, let alone pre-empting the implosion of a speculative bubble.
Isn't it high time we got rid of this unreliable pension system based on financial speculation? Isn't the solidarity between successive generations of workers a far more trustworthy guarantee for our future after retirement? Just as our taxes pay to provide a Health Service for all, why shouldn't our pension contributions cater for the needs of all existing pensioners, thereby putting our pension money beyond the reach of the profit sharks, once and for all?