Who would have thought that strike action over a final salary pension scheme would shut down the pipeline that carries nearly half of Britain’s North Sea oil, leading to fears of oil shortages and petrol rationing?

If you had asked a group of workers 20 years ago what they thought of their company pension, they would probably have said: “What pension?”

In those days, most workers were automatically enrolled into their company’s final salary pension scheme as a condition of employment and were often unware that they belonged to a scheme, let alone a final salary one.

Two decades later, having witnessed the Maxwell scandal, the mis-selling of personal pensions and the fight for redress by those final salary schemes, workers have belatedly woken up to the true value of occupational schemes.

But it is interesting to note that the 1,200 strikers at the Grangemouth refinery, near Edinburgh, are fighting against the closure of their scheme to new members, not to existing members.

The scheme is relatively new, with no pensions in payment and therefore in surplus. So the employer, Ineos’s,  decision to close the scheme to new members appears to be mean and penny pinching.

For the workers of Grangemouth and elsewhere, the coin has finally dropped that the closure of company pension schemes will damage the retirement prospects of  their children and grandchildren, who will have to make do with money purchase arrangements such as group personal pensions, which will never be able to replicate the benefits provided by a final salary scheme.

Workers in GPPs will be disappointed with the level of pension they receive when they come to retirement, unless they have had a very generous employer, made massive contributions themselves, or both.

In practice, when employers shift from final salary to money purchase arrangements, the employer contribution typically halves  from around 15 per cent to 6 per cent. Workers are left to make their own investment decisions which few are equipped to do without advice.  When they come to retirement they are left at the mercy of their fund’ s performance and annuity rates.

The trades unions have been flat-footed with regard to preserving final salary schemes. They were largely conspicuous by their absence during the personal pension mis-selling scandal - possibly because they didn’t want to rock the boat, given that millions of their members belong to gold-plated public sector schemes, paid for by the taxpayer.

As for winning redress for workers who lost their pensions through company insolvencies, that battle was fought and won by pensions expert, Ros Altmann.

Today 75 per cent of final salary schemes are closed to new members and some schemes have been shut down altogether. The unions are now fighting a rearguard battle to save what’s left of the final salary industry when the time to do so was in 1997, with the axing of the tax credit on dividends.

Ineos, for its part, should consider other options to closing its scheme to new members - such as a shift to a career average basis or some form of risk sharing, such as abandoning the inflation-linking of pensions in payment, and raising the retirement age in line with increases in longevity.

For the time being, however, both sides appear to be entrenched. It will be intersting to see who blinks first.