Who pays Captain Jamison's pension?

[thrash]

Before there was the Official Traveller Universe (tm), there was the setting implied by the rules as written. For the most part, this was a broadly drawn space opera of the imperial variety. But there were occasional quirky, idiosyncratic bits thrown in.

The Merchant career was described in simple, generic terms:

Merchants of the commercial enterprises. Merchants may crew the ships of the large trading corporations, or they may work for the independent free traders which carry chance cargos and passengers between worlds.

Like the Navy, Marines, and Army careers (but unlike Scouts or "Others"), merchant characters who complete 20 years' service or more receive retirement pay, in the form of an annual pension. It's not a lot -- Cr4,000 (or about $20,000 in 2023) per year at 20 years, +50% per additional four-year term -- but it is enough to cover basic subsistence-level food and lodging (Cr3,600/year).

The question, however, is who pays this pension?

For the military careers, this appears to be fairly straightforward: the service or its parent government pays. For merchants who "crew the ships of the large trading corporations," it also seems reasonable to infer that the corporation is responsible for paying.

The problem is merchants who "work for the independent free traders." How are individual, privately owned ships able to afford to pay these kinds of pension over the life of the recipient? (Note that characters from the Army career "may also be mercenaries for hire," which raises some of the same issues.)

One possibility is this expense is factored into the life of a standard starship mortgage. In this case, the banks involved set aside a portion of the monthly payments they receive to create a pension fund. This implies a "merchant service" that can at least track merchant personnel over the duration of a career and validate their years of service, even if split among multiple employers, and assign individual accounts to banks to pay.

Another possibility is that the "merchant service" itself acts as a guild, collecting funds (still likely from mortgage payments, broker fees, and such) and dispersing them directly to retired members. This implies a more powerful organization, especially if it can force the large corporations to contribute.

Somewhere in between is a split solution, where a "Free Traders Association" fills the role of a guild for the independent ship owners but large lines manage pension funds on their own or through the banks.

The existence of a strong "merchants guild" might, however, go a long way to explaining another mystery: who funds the "ship acquisition program" (so called in the Alexander Jamison Character Generation Example) that grants millions of credits in equity to selected merchant captains?