There is one faultline beneath the surface in every workplace, one that divides employees and certainly fosters great resentment. Not the male/female divide. Not the officer/footsoldier divide. But the gulf between long-servers and recent recruits. Long-servers know how to play the system. They know where the bodies are buried. They know where power really resides and how to tap into it. And on occasions they get away with murder because they are too expensive to sack. By contrast, new recruits struggle for years while they learn the ropes.

There is one way in particular in which long-servers are favoured: the way their pensions are structured. This is now becoming an embarrassing anomoly in many workplaces. Long-servers are still piling up valuable benefits in defined benefit schemes, while newer recruits are being offered inferior defined contribution schemes. The pensions apartheid applies usually regardless of seniority, age or pay.

Staff in DB schemes continue to accrue guaranteed benefits linked to their leaving salary, while colleagues in DC schemes have relatively small contributions made on their behalf - and are left to the mercy of the share and bond markets.

Soaring life expectancy and shrinking investment returns have widened the gap. HSBC revealed the true scale of its two-tier pension arrangements in the UK this week. For staff recruited before 1996 it was paying a staggering 37 per cent of their salaries a year into their gold-plated DB scheme. For colleagues arriving since 1996 it was paying just 6 per cent or less into a bog-standard DC scheme. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that long-servers identical in every way to post-1996 arrivals are receiving 31 per cent more in total remuneration.

Short of telling the 40,000 of its British staff on the DC scheme they were second-rate citizens compared with their 18,000 luckier colleagues, it's hard to imagine a more potent way of damaging solidarity.

HSBC is now biting the bullet, watering down future accruals for people in the DB scheme or asking them to make a contribution for the first time. By contrast, it is raising its contribution levels for DC staff.

This is a blow to the long-servers, mostly veterans from Midland Bank days. Their union, Unite, is appalled, arguing correctly that Peter is being robbed to pay Paul but over-egging things by claiming this puts members in a “precarious” position. If HSBC's coddled DB members are precarious, then there are no words to describe the position of their DC colleagues. Bluntly, 12 years or more in the DB scheme is worth more than an entire career in the DC one.

Where HSBC leads, others will one day follow. Royal Bank of Scotland, HBOS, Prudential and Lloyds TSB are among blue chips in a similar position. The odds favour change: with every passing year the favoured DB members become a smaller minority with dwindling influence.

patrick.hosking@thetimes.co.uk

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