I was talking to my grandmother, and it came up in conversation that she didn't get a pension from her job. This surprised me, because I had perceived her workplace as somewhere that would be progressive about labour relations and employee benefits. It turns out that a significant majority of the employees didn't want a pension, because their husbands had pensions. (Apparently it was an all-female workplace.) I sat there stunned and baffled for quite some time, and then asked "So did husbands not lose their jobs in those days?"
Apparently they didn't. Apparently job security was so great in those days that the fact that your spouse happens to be currently employed in a job that currently offers a pension is a good enough reason to go around declining the employer's offer to set up an employee pension plan!
So how did we get here?
Everyone wants a better life for their children - certainly no one wants life for their children to be worse. No one cradles their newborn baby and dreams of them having to work until the age of 80. So how, in two generations, did we get from a place where you can just turn down a perfectly good pension to a place where it's considered an obscene luxury to be eliminated?
3 comments:
It's really awful the way things have deteriorated. I think such an importance on stock markets was a key part of it. Publicly held companies have one focus: profit. Sure, every company needs to make a profit but when you have a single owner who feels responsibility to his employees he tends to act a bit different.
Were fewer companies on the stock market in the past or something?
Globalization, conglomeration (so the ultimate owners of the company are completely disconnected from the workforce and even the product or service produced), massive emphasis on the bottom line and constant events in the company (buying other companies, merging, expanding, as opposed to simply producing something and making a modest profit), deregulation, deskilling and devaluing of the labour force...
In short, unchecked capitalism. Capitalism with the gloves off. We are told we need this "to stay competitive" with world markets.
Meanwhile, world markets are all deteriorating the same way, from our point of view.
It's so frustating, so sad.
Post a Comment