Who Should Own a Pension Surplus - Employer or Employees? An Assessment of Arguments About Asymmetry of Risks and Rewards and Deferred Wages in Pension Plans
Bibliographic record
Abstract
If a defined-benefit (DB) pension plan has more assets than liabilities, who should own the "surplus" assets that are not needed to meet the plan's benefit obligations? This report, prepared for the Ontario Expert Commission on Pensions, assesses two leading arguments about ownership of pension surpluses - the asymmetry argument and the deferred-wage argument.\nThe asymmetry argument holds that the party with the burden of funding pension deficits should get the benefit of pension surpluses. Employers claim that Ontario law is "asymmetric" because employers must fund pension deficits while employees get some or all of the benefit when a plan terminates with a surplus. This asymmetry, employers contend, undermines the incentive to maintain and properly fund DB plans. The report analyzes the burdens and benefits of pension funding under Ontario law and whether "asymmetry" threatens DB plans. While the pension funding rules do appear to create asymmetric benefits and burdens, a more fundamental problem may be that Ontario law creates a zero-sum conflict between employers, who get the benefit of a surplus in an ongoing plan, and employees, who get the benefit of a surplus when a plan terminates. This conflict threatens to undermine the trust that is necessary for DB plans to operate.\nThe deferred-wage argument holds that employer contributions to a pension plan are deferred wages. Because employees own the funds contributed to their pension plan, unions and other advocates for employees contend that employees should own any pension surplus derived from these funds. The report raises several questions about the premises and reasoning of the deferred-wage argument.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".