Thing is, it’s perfectly possible to have good pension (or healthcare) plans without them being tied to specific employers.
In fact, most of the world switched to doing that in like, the 50s. In fact, the US sort of does that as well, but only with Social Security, which is the same plan with the same taxes for every worker.
The difference isn’t even a matter of which employer is making the agreement, but how the pensions are calculated.
Roughly speaking, there are two ways to calculate pensions, either by definite benefits or by definite contributions.
In the first way, they calculate an average of your wages, and then give you a proportion of that average, depending on how much time you worked and contributed to the pension fund; in this scheme, you don’t have pension savings at your name and you might end getting less or more money than the amount you paid as pension taxes (but generally it’s more).
On the second way, which is how 401k plans or the Chilean AFPs work, you have a pension savings account at your name on which your contributions are held, and the averaging exercise only serves to calculate the rate at which you’ll be spending your own money when retiring: you always get the same money you saved, plus or less how much it rented in the financial market.
The key difference is that definite benefits are a solidarity scheme, where a large group of people of different ages all contribute to the same fund, allowing the current pensioners to retire more money than what they contributed by using the savings the younger workers still don’t need to use, in the understanding that there will ever be a younger (and ideally bigger) generation contributing but not spending.
Yup, that’s why you might have heard some crazy right wingers saying that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. To be completely honest, it sort of is, but believe me, the alternative is far worse for almost everyone!
With definite contributions, because everyone only gets their own money back, the biggest share of the population that never earned huge wages will receive a very small pension that isn’t enough to replace their previous earnings, and might not even be enough to survive on it.
So, because letting poor old people to die in destitution isn’t something a government can sustainably do when it’s not a dictatorship, there comes the time on which a “non-contributive” pension scheme gets invented, which gives everybody, or at least everybody poor enough, a small pension, regardless of how much they worked, paid by general taxes. This sort of resolves the immediate problem but generally is a bare minimum solution, and still then, it’s much more expensive, because the money is spent immediately instead of saved for decades and then used after it grows bigger by being invested in productive areas of the economy, like pension funds are.
In resume: 401k are shit because there’s just your money in there, and you don’t earn like a CEO, you shouldn’t need to work in the same company all your life to have a good, definite benefits pension, and those pension plans will always be better than definite contributions while things like an overall trend of population and economic growth still exist in the future decades.
