Sounds eerily similar to what happened during the Enron saga. So many employees tricked into keeping all their pension savings into the stock. Quite a sad story.
It's sad, but I think "tricked" is a simplification. Being tricked into thinking it was safer than it was, yes, but being tricked in order to boost the share price or maintain the company, I'm not so sure.
Even towards the end the CEO was taking out personal loans secured on his Enron shares... in order to buy more Enron shares. This was a big contributor to the snowball effect when the share price started falling. I think the top people at Enron honestly believed in the stock and were probably mostly pushing it for employees on this basis. That was pure hubris, thinking they were smarter than everyone else. They should have known better and some were rightfully prosecuted for their part, but it's a bit more complicated than saying the employees were "tricked".
Yeah OP called it a pension when it was really a 401(k) — but Enron had some sort of setup where employees could choose to buy Enron shares at a discount into their 401(k) but importantly, Enron’s “employer contributions” were also in the form of Enron stock, which couldn’t be sold by the employee until they turned 50. Then when the company started failing, they instituted a trading blackout so employees couldn’t sell their stock for weeks before the bankruptcy.
Of course, there was a corporate pension as well that failed and was was also largely in Enron stock. So now those liabilities are owned by the PBGC.
