[Employees without pension arrangements]

Old age pensions in modern western industrial countries rest on three pillars: public, collective and individual-private arrangements. The flat-rate public system and the collective systems, domain of industrial relations, prevail in Holland. Since the early seventies the public old age pension (AOW) has been raised to the net minimum wage level. In the meantime the importance of the collective systems has been increasing. The pension levels of these systems are, however, not prescribed by law. In order to measure the present state of the collective systems the Dutch Chamber of Pensions has started a research project to investigate how many workers lack such an arrangement and why they lack it. The results of the project have recently been reported: in 1985 18% (650,000) of the workers (25-65 years) lacked an arrangement. The vast majority of them (87%) was found in the sector of services, especially the commercial services. A second research project has been started to find out the quality of the existing pension arrangements. The results of the two projects together are meant to answer the question whether or not some sort of collective pensions must be enforced by law. The improvement of collective pension schemes, however, should not lead automatically to decreasing public schemes. For most people the public pension system is the most important source of income.