Nearly four weeks into the Boeing worker strike, the parties are no closer to reaching a union contract. The plane manufacturer offered a 30% pay increase over four years, and union members said no. The major sticking point here? Pensions. Boeing workers stopped getting defined benefit plans a decade ago, and they want them back.

Fifty years ago, most full-time workers had a pension. Once they retired, their employers sent them a check every month, until they died. But in the 1980s, pensions started to disappear.

“Organizations don’t like pensions because of the cost and uncertainty,” said Lynne Vincent, a management professor at Syracuse University.

They’re costly because typically every full-time employee gets a pension without opting in, unlike a 401(k). And uncertain because employers don’t know how long retirees will live and keep getting benefits. But that’s also why workers like pensions.

Last year, just 15% of workers had access to pension plans. Now, unionized workers like the ones at Boeing are negotiating to get them back. Whether they’re likely to succeed depends on who you ask.

“I’d be very, very surprised if it ended up as part of any agreement,” said Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. She said pensions were designed in a time when employees stayed at the same giant company.

“They don’t work so well when you have smaller companies, more mobile workforce … and people are living longer,” she said.

But they do work well in a high-interest-rate environment, like right now. If an employer promises a pension, they have to invest that money upfront. The higher the interest rate, the smaller that initial investment can be, because it’ll grow.

Labor economist and The New School professor Teresa Ghilarducci specializes in retirement. She said pension plans are potentially a better deal for employers than they were, say, 10 years ago. 

“Because it comes in a macro environment where it may be cheaper and more attractive for the employers to reinstate them,” she said.

Ghilarducci said workers are seeing their parents retiring and want the financial security they got with their pensions. And if unionized workers succeed in securing pensions with some of the bigger employers, it could start a trend.

“It’s often the big employers that lead the way,” she said, “Because they’re setting corporate norms.”

Boeing’s offers have gotten more generous as the strikes have gone on, but the company said it can’t accept the union’s demands and remain competitive.

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