EDITORIAL
Pensions and the Professional Should the base for retirement income be portable?
M
ore and more employers are seeing to it that their employees have pensions. As a widely available benefit, the pension is fairly new in the history of payment for work, and it still carries the feeling of being payment on a different basis from salary. It is a step forward in making the indefinite future less frightening to the wage or salary earner who knows that some day he likely will be too old to work. Pension funds attract employees. The employer can look upon the pension as a reward he offers a man for giving a full life of service. That sense of reward may be destroyed if the employee who leaves after a few years is allowed to take his pension fund with him. Is the sense of reward for long service greater in the mind of the giver or of the receiver? That can be argued either way. But there is little argument against the idea that the employer's goal should be to derive the best level of productivity from his people. And while economic security is important, the satisfaction that comes from the feeling of personal freedom is undeniably stimulating. Certainly that is true for the professional man. To be anchored by a pension plan is to be stayed by the dead hand of security. The academic people set out on a different route over a half century ago (page 68), and have made portable pensions a part of a system that has managed to attract and hold quite a good share of productive brains—at salaries that were, until recently, notably modest. Their system is made to seem quite attractive.
The true professional man should be a rather independent type, relying chiefly on the use of his abilities to achieve his goals. The more of that kind of feeling that can be instilled in productive people, the higher their productivity is likely to rise. Indeed, not only are the abler people not likely to be held to a given organization by pension prospects; they are likely even to be dampened in the spirit and enthusiasm so necessary to intellectual productivity if they think they sense an effort to trap them with paternalistic plans or devices for their future support. Whether a portable pension plan could be worked out for chemists and chemical engineers is a complicated question. But employers' contributions should be presented as what they are: current payment for current services, retained and invested in the employee's pension fund. They should not be held up as a pot of gold to be reached at the end of a sometimes tarnished rainbow. When pensions are considered in the light of current compensation, the chemist or chemical engineer to whom they are offered can feel himself more of a professional, and the employer should then get a better return on his investment.
NOV. 1, 1965 C&EN
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