CITY AND SUBURBAN
Institutionalised arrangements for watering the workers' beer
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Personal pensions are under starter's orders for the off this summer like a high-class horse which, long prepared to win the Lincoln Handicap, finds itself drawn on the stands side of the course. A horse can in theory win from there, but that is not the way they bet. Everyone in employment will have the right to own his own personal pension arrangements and take them with him from job to job; no one can any longer be compelled to belong to his employer's scheme. For the first time, companies are actually marketing their own schemes to their staff. That must be an improvement on a state of affairs where, as the pension funds' own survey shows, half their members 'literally' do not know the first thing about them. The companies, though, can and do say that, to those who opt for personal pensions schemes, they will make the bare minimum contribution required under law. To those who join their scheme or stay with it, they offer more. The personal pension operators are concentrating their own marketing effort on the smaller companies and those which have no funded schemes. Against the big, established schemes they think the advan- tage of the draw unbridgeable. It is a form of discrimination, giving unequal reward for equal work, which, if the discrimination were between men and women, would land the company in court. Unless or until the law enforces equality of treatment, it ought to be demanded as a term of employment, by individuals negotiating their contracts, and by those who negotiate for them. Conventional pension schemes discrimin- ate against women in favour of men, against the young in favour of the old, against the lowly-paid in favour of the highly-paid. Trades unions are now waking up to suspect these institutionalised arrangements for watering the workers' beer. So should a government which has made pension ownership a staple of policy, alongside house and share ownership.
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