Trade unionist Elio Marazzi, born 75 years ago, has many years of experience in the field of occupational pensions. In the specialist magazine Schweizer Personalpension, he said: “Peer-to-peer administration 2nd pillar is great.”
this is it. It would be good at this moment to write something positive about the decrepit 2nd pillar. So I don’t want to contradict the trade unionist, but I still want my ambiguous observation to be known.
This was over 20 years ago. The major shareholder of the publishing company, on whose board of trustees I served as an employee representative, also owned a bank and a real estate company. Therefore, it was only natural that the pension fund’s securities and real estate portfolios should be managed by these same companies. I have discovered a conflict of interest here and have submitted a request for review. Management was very inconvenient. The financial director, my fellow student, then tried to collectively distance me from my project.
I told him: what is your problem? “Your employer votes no anyway, and you, as chairman of the board of trustees, have the casting vote.” He smiled. Here’s how things were back then.
Later, on the board of trustees of another pension fund, I saw the head of the real estate department at his last meeting before retirement approve my request for an increase in the interest rate on the assets of the pension fund – as the sole representative of the employer. He was to increase his pension assets by a good 10,000 francs. The problem is that the so-called representatives of the employer are actually employees, i.e. are insured in a pension fund like everyone else.
In the third example, I suffered the most as a taxpayer. The pension fund Bolligen-Ittigen-Ostermundigen (BIO), which insured the municipal employees of the three mentioned suburbs of Bern, was in a difficult position after a great financial crisis. The board of trustees was accused of reacting too late. Taxpayers and employees paid the bill. The cash register is in liquidation.
The employer’s representative on this board of trustees was the mayor, who was 100 percent employed and therefore insured by the pension fund. He was about to retire and benefited from the fact that the reorganization of the pension fund was going very indecisively.
Here, too, there was a so-called representative of the employer on the board of trustees, who is actually an employee. In state funds, not bosses should represent the interests of employers, but real employers. In other words: taxpayers.