No reason but greed

But company bosses have clearly seen that many other profitable companies are already acting in this unscrupulous way, cutting back on workers' rights in order to boost shareholder dividends.

The magnificent 97 per cent vote for strike action by the workforce, to take effect on April 27-28, should make the company think again.

Many of these occupational pension schemes were set up at a time when companies understood that they had a responsibility to work with trade unions to ensure that workers could look forward to a decent standard of living in retirement.

But, in recent decades, employers have taken advantage of a perceived loss of trade union influence, together with encouragement by a neoliberal government, to cast their employees adrift to make their own provisions for life after work.

Throughout the 1980s, when the stock market was generating impressive returns, many companies took contribution holidays, claiming that the schemes were overprovided for.

Boardroom bonuses and shareholders dividends were the beneficiaries of these reductions in corporate expenditure.

However, in later years, when returns were lower and there was pressure on pension schemes, employers developed short-term memory loss about their own selfish behaviour and insisted either that staff increased their contributions or that pension scheme provisions would be reduced.

Some companies have tried to bring in their new schemes with minimum conflict, by appealing to the existing workforce's selfishness and restricting worsened conditions to new entrants.

Ineos plans to drop its final-salary scheme for future staff, but it is also insisting that existing scheme members cough up as well.

Its Grangemouth chief executive Tom Crotty says that the new scheme would mean that "the current workforce will have to make a contribution towards their pension for the first time, bringing them into line with the vast majority of employees in the UK and with other Ineos employees."

He should recognise that the current workforce already contributes - what else does the plant's daily £3 million profits represent but the workers' surplus labour?

The company tries to set people's flesh crawling by saying that a quarter of the salary bill goes into the pension scheme and that this proportion could rise.

So what? Pensions are simply deferred wages and what these figures represent is that working people are being paid, as wages, only a tiny part of the wealth that they create. If they prefer to prioritise their pensions, that should not bother Ineos.

All that the company has to do is honour the arrangements that it set up in agreement with the union all those years ago, rather than try to alter the rules to benefit itself, while cutting workers' pay.

When even extremely profitable companies such as Ineos try to chip away at their staff pension scheme, it underlines the criminality of the government's constant erosion of the state pension.

After the scandals of "mis-selling" of private pensions and closure of final-salary schemes, the government has to accept its responsibility to ensure dignity for retired working people.