When workers accept lower wages or wage increases in exchange for pension contributions from employers (the usual way pension plans are financed), they usually authorize their contributions to flow into funds managed by the usual fund managers. This results in funds searching for maximal returns, etc. Workers' funds then add to the funds of others squeezing workers as far as possible to get those maximal returns. What's usually worse is that workers become partly identified with the pension funds and their managers' goals and ways of thinking, thereby adding to the ideological and political supports of a rapacious capitalism driven by finance. What gains they obtain for the relatively small wealth they have in the funds is then offset by their direct and indirect sufferings from the economic and political impacts of the funds' behaviors.

Far better would be the pooling of workers' funds for pensions purposes to establish an alternative economic system with alternatively organized enterprises funding a political movement to change the entire society. That is "the next big thing" that will, I think, arise.