The total value of the system is on the order of $18 trillion dollars, slightly more than the ~$15 trillion annual GDP. https://www.ici.org/pressroom/news/ret_10_q4
Too, employees have far more at stake, and far less negotiating power, than employees, a fact quite openly recognised in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (Book 1, Chapter 8: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_...)
There's further a great deal of other infrastructure which reinforces the existing system, from tax and other laws based on employer-provided benefits (including substantial advantages to both employers and employees participating in such plans), and of the services industries built around these (it's far more economical, and actuarially defensible, to deal with groups of people, particularly large aggregates, than one-on-one).
Which means that:
1. You cannot simply turn this ship on a dime. It's quite literally larger than the economy.
2. Changes to present employee benefits represents a material change in compensation and risk profile to those employees, for which they're poorly equipped to either address or organise against.
That is why the social security system needs to start being changed for longer lifespans, not for those who operated under the current system, but so it can remain solvent for those entering the program now.
While I have a similar sentiment regarding the fact that employers should get out of the business of retirement, life insurance, medical, etc., that's the way it's been for the older generation. Phase it out, don't just cut everyone over and cut benefits in one moment.
Same with Social security, for that matter.
* Plan freeze: All currently earned benefits are given to the employee without any future opportunity to earn further benefit. In this case, the earned benefits are still there, just now one needs to find another retirement system.
* New freeze / Grandfather Freeze: All current employees are allowed to fill out the vesting period, but new employees are not allowed onto the pension.
Aside: nice handle.
* The pension based retirement defined benefit plan is a bonus item that originated because the government encouraged it in the 1921 Revenue Act [1] by exempting pensions from being taxed as income. Then when the National Labor Relations Board "interpreted" the law 27 years later to include it as a benefit that was inclusive of employment did it become a larger liability. Large companies were able to absorb the costs of pensions being paid into the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation [2] after the 1974 setting of requirements, hurting the ability of small companies to set up comparable benefits. The slow death march of private based pensions follows the incentive curve and the movement to defined contribution for companies enables smaller companies to be more competitive with the big companies [3].
* The medical coverage one vexes me financially, as I do not know how guaranteed this is, of all the things that would be eliminated in a bankruptcy, this is most probable and would save the receiving company a lot of money.
My point here is that the 401k and retirement program free of the company means you create an employee who has more worries about retirement, but is not locked into an employer's retirement pension contribution system.
[1] http://www.ebri.org/publications/facts/index.cfm?fa=0398afac...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pension_Benefit_Guaranty_Corpo...
[3] http://20somethingfinance.com/defined-benefit-vs-defined-con...