The Risk Pool: an interesting article by Malcom Gladwell on pensions, arguing that in the 1950s American unions wanted to spread pensions across companies, while companies (fearing the free flow of employees) pushed for company based pensions. That you can tell teh health of an economy (whether it's a country or a company) by looking at its dependency ratio: the ratio of workers to dependents in the economy.

The labor movement believed that the safest and most efficient way to provide insurance against ill health or old age was to spread the costs and risks of benefits over the biggest and most diverse group possible. Walter Reuther, as Nelson Lichtenstein argues in his definitive biography, believed that risk ought to be broadly collectivized. Charlie Wilson, on the other hand, felt the way the business leaders of Toledo did: that collectivization was a threat to the free market and to the autonomy of business owners. In his view, companies themselves ought to assume the risks of providing insurance.

In fact, a system in which companies shoulder their own benefits is ultimately a system that penalizes companies for offering any benefits at all.

For that matter, if you pooled the obligations of every employer in the country, no company would go bankrupt just because it happened to employ older people, or it happened to have been around for a while, or it happened to have made the transformation from open-hearth furnaces and ingot-making to basic oxygen furnaces and continuous casting. This is what Walter Reuther and the other union heads understood more than fifty years ago: that in the free-market system it makes little sense for the burdens of insurance to be borne by one company. If the risks of providing for health care and old-age pensions are shared by all of us, then companies can succeed or fail based on what they do and not on the number of their retirees.