A report on pensions by the Institute for Fiscal Studies should give all working people and their trade unions cause for serious concern.
The institute forecasts that government reforms due to kick off in 2012, under which workers will be automatically enrolled into company pension schemes or into new lost-cost "personal accounts," will boost retirement saving - but only by a little.
In the new scheme, individuals will have to contribute at least 4 per cent of their pay to a pension, while their employer pays in 3 per cent and the government contributes 1 per cent.
The institute pointed out that in 2005 there were around 4.7 million employees who hadn't been offered the chance to join a work-based pension scheme.
But it estimated that around half of these 4.7 million people would have made total contributions of less than £2,170 over the five years to the end of 2005.
Any increase in pension saving is, at least in absolute terms, likely to be small, the institute warned.
At the GMB conference last week, with what is likely not to be a coincidence of figures that union heard that 4,713,400 working families were in receipt of child and working tax credits to top up low incomes.
It is difficult to imagine the shattering impact on these families of losing 4 per cent of their income to a new pension scheme every week, especially in a period during which zero pay rises have become more and more prevalent.
And all for a pension which is likely to be minimal, given the facts of life in post-credit crunch Britain.
BP will close its final-salary pension arrangement to new entrants from April next year, while Barclays Bank is taking about 18,000 staff out of its final-salary arrangement and into an inferior defined contribution scheme.
Anyone with a £50,000 pension fund retiring in 2009 will be 27 per cent worse off - around £20 per week - than someone who quit in 2008, according to current annuity figures.
Intune, the financial services arm of Age Concern and Help The Aged, recently found that 55 per cent of private pension-holders were very disappointed with the pension annuity income they expect to receive when they stop work and failures of the investment markets aren't likely to help matters.
The capitalist dogma which says that stock markets can always be relied upon to deliver strong returns has left millions facing an impoverished old age.
And the government's new scheme will mean that 4 per cent of the poorest working people's cash will be slung straight at those selfsame markets to play with as the speculators see fit.
Millions of people are now struggling with the effects of market collapse on their company and private pensions and we are nowhere near the end of the consequences of the credit crisis.
The government's so-called reform of the pension sector is merely an attempt to transfer the burden of pension payments into the private sector and away from the state pension system. But it was conceived and planned way before the free-market economy went into meltdown.
There can be no sane reason for continuing an adventure into the markets to underwrite pensions, when the markets have clearly demonstrated their inability to deliver. And there can be no excuse for burdening the two most vulnerable sectors of the population, pensioners and the low paid, with the results of an experiment which we can clearly see is doomed before it starts.
It's been said before, but we must say it again. The government can afford an adequate and responsive state pension scheme. It owes it to the elderly to provide it and to the low paid to ensure that they don't end up funding it out of already inadequate wages.
