If you’ve get paid in salary + stocks in the company you work for, these will be taxed more heavily. Lots of people have this arrangement. It’s irritating to be told you don’t work for it. It’s not like there’s a choice in how you get paid.
You do have a choice because other employers exist who pay salary only. You didn't have to take that job. Let's be honest here: payment in stocks is a tax dodge and that loophole will be tightened.
The issue is that the government wants everyone to work longer.
With falling birth rates and an aging population, it's not about what the Govt wants but what the nation can afford.
tl;dr: Pensions are Ponzi schemes that only work if birthrates stay high and lifespans stay fairly short. As birth rates fall and lifespans lengthen, the Govt has to act to increase the ratio of workers to retirees or the Ponzi schemes will collapse completely.
The long explanation: Most people's pensions are based on investments, right? What we call investing is basically a way to get other people to give you money by them working and paying you money every year in return for you providing some money upfront, with the risk that you might get zero payment if the workers' efforts fail. For the investee, investing is like a loan but the principal can never be repaid, only endless interest unless their business folds.
There are fewer people being born whilst the population of retirees gets ever-larger as people die later. This means that there are fewer people working to generate dividends, which are the payments I described as "endless interest", whilst the number of people trying to live on those dividends increases.
Ever since the invention of both the State pension and private pension schemes, the people currently working have always paid for the living costs of the people currently retired, with an expectation that we'll get the same deal when our retirement comes. The pension pot is an actuarial fiction to calculate individual entitlements to payments from a scheme; there isn't a bank vault with your name on it somewhere holding all the money you've ever paid in, to be paid out to you later, even though some people talk about "their pot" as though it is a pile money reserved exclusively for them. That money has already been spent on shares and other investment instruments to earn dividends now, so that the current dividends of everyone in your pension scheme are paying for current retirees. It is future dividends, including dividends earned on the contributions of people still working after you've retired, that will pay for you when you retire.
With fewer people of working age and more retirees (plus other macroeconomic factors like oil and tobacco companies no longer being the safe long-term investments that they once were and schemes coming under pressure to avoid arms companies, another safe investment because countries are always going to have armies, on ethical grounds), there will come a time when the dividends earned by pension schemes simply won't be enough to pay for all the retirees. A responsible government tries to preempt that early on by raising State retirement ages a little bit at a time and taking steps to deter people from using private pension schemes to retire early. This might feel unfair to individuals, I know that I'm not happy about having to work for longer, but the alternative is national socio-economic collapse.