Keeping retirement weird. Pensions are a promise. Everywhere in the world.

Last night we went to a Pete Seeger sing-along at the Old Town School of Folk Music.

That’s what they called a hootenanny back in my day. I left my uke at home, but plenty of folks brought instruments. The OTS projected the words and chords up on the screen and different staff members came up to lead us in songs Pete had written or sung or both.

Including Frank Hamilton, one of the original founders and teachers at the School. Frank is 80 now. But I remember him from when my cousin Letty took me to the Idyllwild Folk Festival up on San Jacinto Mountain east of LA when I was a kid in the early 60s. A group of friends showed up at our cabin and started strumming, picking and singing. And in walked Hamilton, who had a reputation among folkies even then.

Meanwhile, in China this week workers have been in a battle for their pensions.

Imagine.

As I was reading about this, I  thought  about the guy – a leading voice in the anti-testing movement – who told me that pensions are just a local Illinois issue.

You don’t get much more not-local than China.

In Dongguan, China workers making Nike and Adidas sneakers have been robbed of their pensions by their Taiwanese bosses.

And they’re not too happy about it.

40,000 workers walked off the job last week in protest.

The bosses say that the failure to pay into the employee pension fund was just a misunderstanding.

For years the company had underpaid the social security contributions that employees were counting on for retirement.

“Before, we were naïve and always getting tricked,” said Xiao Zhixiong, 30, a migrant from China’s central Hunan Province who makes sneaker molds. “Now, we’re learning to be smart.”

Sprawled along a fetid river that winds through Gaobu township, the No. 3 Yue Yuen complex includes factories, dormitories and a basketball court. Just beyond the gates, fruit vendors and noodle restaurants compete for workers’ hard-earned cash, as does a sleek Footzone shoe store owned by the company. Above its doors, a purple billboard advertising Nike Air Max sneakers is emblazoned with the word “defy” — an exhortation that might sound empowering to Western consumers, but is downright subversive in China.

On April 14, defy is what tens of thousands of workers did. A month earlier, Yue Yuen employees discovered that the company was calculating pension contributions on their base wages, rather than total incomes that included lucrative overtime. Despite sporadic street protests and entreaties to the government-backed union, the company repeatedly rejected their demands for the unpaid benefits, as well as a pay raise and an improved contract, workers said.

“The factory director told us, ‘If you’re looking for us to repay, I can tell you it’s not going to happen,’ ” said Liu Hai, 52, an assembly line worker who attended a morning meeting of management and a group of employees. “That afternoon, people just started walking off little by little.”

Fueled by social media, the trickle became a flood. 

The bosses may have claimed it was a misunderstanding.

But it seems the workers understood just fine.

Pensions are a promise.

Everywhere in the world.