IBM managers are in meetings across the country to hear about changes to the company pension.

Observers are speculating that the firm will announce the end of the UK's final salary pension, as it has already done in the US.

A flock of major UK - and US - companies have pulled the plug on their traditional final salary schemes in recent years, blaming growing deficits on reduced stock market returns, a harsher regulatory and fiscal attitude from the government, and retired workers' refusal to die early. Strangely, none of them blames the extended "contributions holidays" many of them took during the long stock market bull run in the 90s.®