It is rather depressing to see that pilots (of all people) can't get their heads around the idea that no amount of demanding and dummy-spitting for a flat earth can change the fact that the earth isn't flat.
A pension fund is a bucket of money which people pay into for a while with the idea of being paid from it when they retire. At any given time the law requires that if people stop paying into it there will be enough money in the bucket to cover all those who will be paid from it (that's why it is NOT a Ponzy scheme). The money in the pot is invested in a range of things, but they have to be largely low-risk investments, to maintain and grow the value in the bucket through capital growth and dividend payouts. Many company pension funds are invested in BA, so if you just grab all the profit and stuff it into the pension fund then the share price plummets, the dividends fall and the bucket develops a huge leak - if BA do it to other pension funds they you can bet those other companies will return the favour. Companies are only allowed to invest a maximum of (IIRC) 5% of the fund in their own shares - a rule that was brought in after Robert Maxwell to prevent fraud.
The value of the pension fund is based on three things - the amount people are paying in, the growth in value and return on the investments, and the predicted liability to pay out in pensions. To deal with these in reverse order:
When I was a lad back when Pontius was still hours-building towards his CPL the mean pensioner duration (the time from retirement to death) was about 8 years, and pension funds were calculated on that basis. Today we are all much healthier, so the mean pension duration is now between two and three times that (depending on which numbers you use and how). This means that the pension bucket for a given scheme and a given number of people needs to be 2-3 times the size that it used to be. People living longer means pensions will be more expensive. This is why gyms, jogging, bicycles, sports of all kinds and healthy foods should all be heavily taxed while tobacco, alcohol, sugar, TV movie channels, cars, comfortable sofas and any product with more than a spoonful of sugar per portion should all be provided free-of-charge on the NHS. That would return life expectancy to a more reasonable number (say 73) and make decent pensions affordable again.
When I was a lad any half-competent fund manager could easily make 8-10% per year on investment returns and the good ones could do nearly double that, so the pension bucket was sat under a fire-hose which just haemorrhaged money into it as a matter of course. Since 2007 investment returns have plummeted. A really, really GOOD fund manager might be able to make 2% from low-risk investments (the only kind pensions are allowed to use), so the bucket now merely sits under a slowly dripping tap. More than anything this has crippled the ability of the fund to generate the cash it needs to meet future pension obligations without increasing the price.
Before 2005 a typical contributory final-salary pension took 3-5% from the employee and about double that from the employer. With the sort life expectancy and the decent investment performance that was sufficient. But due to the two things discussed above it no longer is, leaving the fund with three choices:
1. Quit now, freeze the scheme so that it can cover its existing liabilities at a known cost while it's still do-able.
2. Increase the contribution rates to fill the bucket as fast as the cash is leaking out.
3. Change the whole basis of the scheme from being a pension ("we will pay you some defined proportion of your salary, no matter what it is") to being a savings scheme ("we will take your money and invest it in this fund and when you retire we will give you your own part of the bucket to spend as you wish") - these are the "defined benefit" and "defined contribution" concepts respectively.
The above describes the real world and how it has changed, and no amount of tantrums or handbag thumping will change it. So choices have to be made. My own employer took two routes - it closed the final-salary scheme to new members, but kept it going for existing ones by nearly doubling the contribution rates (both employer and employee) so that where I used to pay 5% as a contribution I now pay 9%. For new members it created a new scheme which was a "50-50 defined contribution/defined benefit" scheme. Half the contributions paid into a pot that would deliver a 33% of final salary pension after 40 years (essentially half the "traditional" pension rate) while the other half would go into a savings scheme that will provide and additional bucket of cash on retirement - this was regarded as the best compromise between shared gain and shared pain. To make this viable it needed to transfer a billion squids-worth of assets into the pension fund and then pay rent on them. But not all companies can do this.
So it looks like your pension scheme is going through the same trauma and it's going to cost you some pain. Well suck it up, because it's already happened to most of the rest of us and that's the world we live in.
PDR