Pensions sound so fake as a zillennial. You work for one place for decades (already sounds fake) and then afterwards you leave and they just. keep paying you. the same amount of money. to do nothing. for the rest of your life. if i wasn't already aware that this was something that readily and commonly existed during my grandparent's days then it would sound like some kind of socialist pipe dream
401(k)s became available in 1978, and that signaled the death of pensions pretty much everywhere that they weren’t part of a union contract. Workers who still have pension plans today are almost universally unionized and that benefit has been a holdover from contracts of the past.
The thing about pensions is that they are deferred compensation. You take a slightly smaller salary than your role should have, and the difference is being invested and paid out to you in retirement. But when 401(k)s became a thing and companies dropped pension plans, compensation never rose enough to offset the difference, and employer contributions to 401(k) plans is lower than what they had to invest in pensions. They got to have their cake and eat it too, and workers got screwed.
And now we’re into a third generation of workers who don’t foresee actually having enough money to ever fully retire.
