Employees should be paid high salaries while they work instead of paying pensions when they leave work. Pensions are one of the biggest headache for world economy. When employees receive high salaries they will invest the money saved every month or every year and after 20 or 30 years when they leave their work/job they will have many times more money (if the investment was profitable). I have been thinking about pensions and high salaries for past 15 years because my idiot father received less salary while working and he had many high profitable investments opportunity when he had the job but he could not invest because of less salary. When he retired he received pension but all the investment opportunity were over and he is a nobody is this world. When employees receive high salaries when they are 25 to 60 years old, they will have good food, good housing, good education for children and excellent savings. No need for pensions.
When my idiot father was earning less salary there were many stocks which have returned profit of 250,000% till some years back. If my father had high salary he would have invested in these stocks. When he retired from work, stock markets were sky high and they were crashing.
And? How do you know your father would have invested? How do you know he would have invested in the right stocks? At any rate, let me explain. There's a lot of reasons to believe that humans (including you and I and your father) are stupid and irrational. We like to consume things in the present rather than save for the future, because we overweigh immediate pleasures at the expense of uncertain future comforts. Why else do you think people eat too much and get fat? Why else do people sexually assault chambermaids in NYC hotels? There's all sorts of good reasons for why this behaviour evolved in humans, but that's a different discussion. As a result, without an incentive, people generally save too little (especially in the West) and end up being wards of the state when they're elderly. That strains the fabric of society in a whole variety of unpleasant ways. That's why govts normally try to create an incentive for people to save (most commonly through taxation). If the pension system is well-designed, reasonably carefully supervised and hasn't made any explicit promises it can't keep (e.g. the Dutch), everybody's happy. If the pension system is based on unrealistic estimates of returns, revenues, etc (e.g. the UK defined benefit schemes, some US funds), it's a sh1tshow and pensioners' standard of living has to fall.
I mean people who have retired should continue receiving pensions or they should be paid one-time lumpsum pension. Employees who are working at present should start receiving high salary but no pension when they retire from work.
My family has lived a minimum resources life because of my idiot father's less salary. If he had high salary he would have invested in stocks or real estates. He had received excellent investment offers but there was no savings for investment. Also there is no guarantee when a person will die. If a person earns high money till the age of 50 or 60 years that is perfect.
The reason I started this thread is that, I read about a giant company whose quarterly profits have fallen 99% because this company transfered all the money for pensions. Example, if earlier the profits were $100 million for a particular quarter, now the profits are $1 million. How can profits fall from $100 million to $1 million suddenly for a giant company which is like the barometer for the health of the country's economy.
I don't know quite how else I can put it to make you understand. Just like in trading, it's very important to NOT put the cart before the horse. It's not a good idea to start thinking about "perfect" outcome. It's a lot better to think about the worst and the median cases. Try doing that and you will find answers to many of your questions. This is not that uncommon when the company has been around for a long time and has a legacy of poorly negotiated (intentionally or otherwise) pension obligations. For instance, in the UK, both BA and BT are large pension funds with airline & telecoms businesses on the side respectively.