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

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

We have just come through the worst episode of job losses that the UK has witnessed for decades and following this down turn we will see the early stages of a recovery over the next few months. However the businesses looking for new workers over the coming months will not be merely replacing like for like in the job offer and benefits stakes. They will be looking to increase employee numbers, but keep a firm check on the benefits that they are tied into for the long term. Pensions offers will be much less attractive, to stop the growth of the current problems and employment contracts may well be for shorter periods.

There may be some positive results from the changes too. As more and more businesses exploit the power of Internet Business we will see some inventive organizations start to enlarge and offer a large amount of flexibility to the worker in terms of hours of work and place of work. This is particularly possible when looking at online businesses. These have usually fared well throughout the slump as they have generally a lower amount of overhead. Indeed a good number of them have in fact sprung up within the recession 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 capacity to Work From Home is on offer, not only providing excellent opportunities for people who have other responsibilities but also keeping the business costs down at the same time. This sort of flexibility will also make sure that the organisations keep hold of as many of their female staff as possible. Those who choose to have children are often in a difficult situation when trying to return to work and these new, much more flexible contracts and Online Jobs will at least be a helpful thing for these workers even though some of the other conditions may be inferior to post downturn job offers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 5:12 pm 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.