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Comment by joeyo | Hacker News Reader

  > Pensions aren't portable - in the modern labor market   
  > where people are expected to have multiple emplyers and 
  > possibly even career arcs, that's a pretty limiting.

Which is the cause and which is the effect? Do workers want to have multiple employers and career arcs?

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Portability is nice. I’ve seen so many people in government just trying to ride it out until they qualify for the pension. They don’t really care about the job and are just trying to avoid having to do anything until it’s time to retire. Long-standing structural problems just get covered up and ignored for the next chump to deal with.

It also represents a huge tax on people who want to be able to change jobs. I would prefer a world where people feel more free to leave jobs that suck or aren’t good fits for them. Locking them down with pensions, options plans, or 401k matching programs that vest over time are all mechanisms for employers to recapture what would have been paid out as wages from employees who leave early (who often tend to be younger).

A UBI that puts you somewhere above the poverty line supplemented with a forced savings program seems like the best move. It gives you portability, simplifies the system and administrative burden, and offers a hedge against the vagaries of the market.

I don't think they necessarily want to, but I think it's often needed for reasons mostly tangential from pensions. But if you accept that multiple jobs/careers are a reality, then pensions plans, as traditionally constructed, don't do much for workers.

I think it's often needed for reasons mostly tangential from pensions

Such as?

Companies used to provide pensions as an incentive to stay at the company long term and not change employers, but really most of them don't care to plan for employees to stay and be developed long term.. so accordingly no pension plan is offered either.

Even ones that still offer pensions, if the support isn't there then it's in conflict with how a pension matures it's benefits. Many companies treat workers as interchangable cogs and don't provide/encourage for any exceptional wage or career growth or training. So to move upward one has to change companies - dropping (or at best pausing) the pension.

Not all companies are like this, but many (most) are. I thought this all was pretty widely understood?

So...it's not that people have to change jobs because pensions don't really exist anymore, it's that there aren't really pensions because companies don't give a shit about employees anymore?

I guess that's a reason other than pensions, technically.

Moving companies is the only way to get a promotion or a substantial raise in the current business climate. Had I stayed at the same company I'd be the highest paid developer but making 40-50% less than what a competitor has paid for my skillset.

To be clear, you're talking about direct cash, right?

Yes - this doesn't apply to big4, who realize this and tend to do a better job of stringing you along with big stock grants.

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