The huge stock market drops in 2008 and earlier in 2001 through 2003 tore a hole through many Americans’ retirement savings accounts. Even with recent stock market gains, many people have yet to fully recover from those losses. As a result, more people are staying in the workforce longer, unable to afford to retire, according to a recent U.S. study.

Those most hurt are those without pensions who plan to pay for their retirement mainly through their retirement investment accounts, such as IRAs and 401(k)s.

Even scarier is an editorial we saw in The New York Times that shows the poverty level of seniors slightly increasing.

The senior population has for decades had one of the lowest poverty rates of any group in the nation, about half the rate of the children we teach. Thanks to Social Security and traditional pensions, such as we have in the Teachers’ Retirement System, many Americans have been able to retire without becoming poor.

But poverty among seniors is now rising slightly due to the combination of longer life expectancy and the decline of traditional pensions. Living longer without a pension puts people at risk of running out of retirement funds.

In addition, there are more elderly women than men, and many female seniors either did not work outside the home, did so for a shorter period than the average man or earned less money at their jobs than men. For all these reasons, elderly women are likely to receive smaller Social Security checks, get lower pension allowances and have less in savings than men.

The average female teacher’s pension, for example, is about $11,500 per year less than a man’s. Women also live longer than men. Just an example of the old age factor: the Teachers’ Retirement System has 2,311 female retirees over age 90 and only 620 men over age 90. The longer lives of women put them at greater risk of using up their assets.

The problem of Americans lacking sufficient funds to last through retirement is likely to get worse. A recent survey by the National Institute on Retirement Security found that only about 50 percent of employees have an employer-sponsored retirement plan, whether a pension or 401(k). And a whopping 45 percent of working-age people have no retirement savings.

This points to the need for our country to preserve Social Security and to re-examine the growing prevalence of defined-contribution retirement plans such as 401(k)s instead of pensions.

A fight on this just took place in Cincinnati, where unions and the Alliance for Retired Americans battled against a ballot initiative that would have eliminated the city’s pension plan and relaced it with a 401(k)-type savings plan for city workers. Thankfully, Cincinnati voters resoundingly rejected the proposal on Nov. 5.

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone magazine writes “All across America, Wall Street is grabbing money meant for public workers.” His article points out how some private money managers who love to invest and profit from public employee pension funds advocate at the same time that public employees do not deserve their pensions. Randi Weingarten and the AFT are leading the fight to combat these greedy managers who disrespect public employees.

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