/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

What are the implications of pension funds for the class status of workers enrolled in them, and for the contemporary state of capitalism in general?
Supposedly, about 45% of US assets, and about 25% of European and Asian assets are held by pension funds. By any standard that's a big chunk of change. About 80% of British workers participate in workplace penson plans (up from 47% in 2012), and about 52% of US private sector workers do too. You could push the figures higher yet by including government sovereign wealth funds, often intended to meet the cost of public sector pensions.

This has two odd implications I'd like you to play with: the first is that any worker enrolled in a company pension plan is arguably, by virtue of that status, an investor. The shareholder who's value the firm strives to maximise is often a pension fund in abstract rather than a traditional porky - a human capitalist trying to get rich. They aren't a shareholder - but they are invested in a financial service that holds shares on their behalf. (An unfortunate lesson for workers when pension funds go under is that pensions aren't all that special as investments go - sometimes you lose everything!)
The second is the oddity that since the pension fund wants to maximize the value of its investment, it can act in odd ways: It's not unknown historically for a company to be asset-stripped at the behest of its own pension fund, for workers to be made unemployed because that course of action maximized the size of the pension fund they were part of… Furthermore, political actions can have odd consequences - for example Liz Truss' attempt at a libertarian turn in UK economic policy ultimately achieved nothing except costing pension funds hundreds of billions of pounds by fucking up their investment strategy.

So, to repeat the opening questions:
1. What is the class status of workers heavily invested in a pension fund? Do they remain proletarian, become petit-bourgeois or bourgeois, or find themselves in some new category? And whatever your answer - why?
2. What are the implications in terms of future capitalist development for such a large chunk of global wealth being owned on behalf of future retirees, rather than by more traditional capitalist investors? An odd situation of a pension-maximizing machine eating the world? The painless socialization of all assets on behalf of the workers? (Are they really so different from Löntagarfonder if you squint?) Intergenerational warfare between the young and the retired? You know the drill, I want takes.

I'm not optimistic about getting good answers but I consider the topic interesting enough to risk it.