Pensions provisions have long since been a dilemma for businesses who have seen over the last 10 years a massive fall in investment returns in their pension funds together with an ever rising life expectancy and therefore mushrooming pension liabilities for these depleted funds to cover.

We have seen organisations try to handle these issues by re defining benefits and asking their staff to accept the planned changes. However a lot of the staff are dissatisfied with the proposed changes and see any cutbacks in their pension availability (and other benefits) as unreasonable. Indeed in the UK at the moment there are huge problems with our postal workers, currently striking in order to defend the long time postal workers benefits. Royal Mail obviously saw problems looming a considerable amount of time ago. The employment contracts offered over the last five years give employees with much less entitlement to benefits (including pensions) than workers who have been with the company for a longer period of time. So we have an strange situation within the organization at the moment, some workers out on strike to defend benefits they themselves are not actually entitled to.

We have just come through the worst phase of job losses that the UK has seen for decades and following this depression we will see the start of a recovery over the next few months. However the businesses looking for new employees over the coming months will not be merely replacing like for like in the job offer and benefits stakes. They will be looking to raise employee numbers, but keep a firm check on the benefits that they are obligated to for the long term. Pensions offers will be much less attractive, to stop the growth of the current issues and employment contracts may well be for short periods.

There may be some positive outcomes from the new style contracts too. As more and more businesses make use of the power of Internet Business we will see some innovative organizations start to increase and offer a large amount of flexibility to the staff member in terms of hours of work and place of work. This is particularly possible when looking at online businesses. These have typically fared well throughout the recession as they have usually a lower amount of overhead. Indeed a good number of them have actually sprung up within the slump plugging holes that the closure of more conventional organisations have left.

Opportunities to work whenever suits the individual are growing with these new business models and even the capability to Work From Home is on offer, not only offering excellent opportunities for people who have other responsibilities but also keeping the business costs down at the same time. This kind of flexibility will also make sure that the organisations keep hold of as many of their female staff as possible. Those who wish to have children are often in a difficult position when trying to return to employment and these new, much more flexible contracts and Online Jobs will at least be a positive thing for these employees even though some of the other conditions may be inferior to post recession job offers.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 26th, 2009 at 12:19 am and is filed under Business and Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.