The prospect of funding pensions

Skewing, the way it is used here, means putting pressure on a decision. In this case, the company will not be actively looking for younger employees.

Many private companies have pension plans, but they are not required to unless it is part of a contract.

I am not clear as to how its used here . I looked up wordwebonline

Verb: skew skyoo
Turn or place at an angle
Example: "the lines on the sheet of paper are skewed"


Here we have 'prevent from skewing' .....I can't match up this with the dictionary meaning.

Could you please elaborate this part ?

Well, it is a change from the original plan. The original plan is skewed towards older workers.

It is kind of idiomatic. It would take a fairly large dictionary to cover such words. Anyway, your example is the way it is commonly used, if that helps.

Skew also means to deviate in a certain direction. It is a term used in statistics and distributional math. If you ask everyone in a class to pick a number from one to ten and the average comes out seven, you could say the numbers were skewed to the high side since you would expect the average to be five or six. In this case, the argument is that the high costs of training and benefits (retirement is a benefit) would cause companies to stay with older, more experienced employees instead of skewing to a younger workforce.



In the US, companies set money aside to be invested so that their employees will have retirement benefits when the time comes. If they don't, they could easily run out of money or go out of business leaving their employees with nothing. This setting aside of money is called "funding" the pension.