Posted by Brian Marks on 09 November 2001 at 10:44:47:
In Reply to: This website's penetration into affected potential pensioners posted by Patrick Randall on 08 November 2001 at 10:24:41:
Pat,
More than 2000 people are registered. This is out of 22,847 total final salary scheme members at end of year 2000. There are another 11005 money-purchase members, if you consider them affected. We do not know how many view the website without registering, how many no longer view because they found it uninteresting or scurrilous, and so on.
Perhaps, as a guess, 60% of the members have internet access. So if the website URL got a lot of national publicity, the registrations might go up noticeable.
The importance of the numbers is questionable. More registrees would be unlikely to improve the presentation of complaints; it might just turn up a whistleblower or an actuary or a forensic accountant who was willing to help, but in terms of materials the registrees we have already include people who kept copies of documents.
More penetration would likely mean more letters to MPs but we already know we are contacting some 10% of them and, given that they work by the key players talking to one another, 20% might make little difference.
There is a very low democratic element in the numbers. We cannot vote for an
executive in Armonk that will honour MIL 785.
Members can change the elected
trustees in 2003 but we do not know what the current ones think individually and
a new set trying to properly balance corporate/member interests would still be a
minority, liable to be outvoted, patronised, and largely silenced.
I am sure you are right that there is potential for "a lot of noise". Making enough noise and turning the noise into progress is hard. To reach Armonk's awareness threshold it would have to get financial analysts concerned about the impact on employee morale, recruitment, brand image and the like. Such factors are not currently high priority.
In the long run noise raises awareness of the grip that multinational
corporations have acquired on our institutions (e.g. Oil company control of the
climate change agenda and of whole countries) and that is (slightly) susceptible
to democratic change. In the meantime we suffer, although there are others that
suffer much more.