Employee Pensions: Policies, Problems, and Possibilities

by Teresa Ghilarducci (Editor)

This volume outlines a fresh view on pension plans from the perspective of both the employer and employee, describing the possibilities in American labor relations and in Congress to meet employers' needs to compete and to fulfill the enduring desire of workers to plan for a financially secure period of leisure at the end of their working lives. The authors examine the advantages to employers from sponsoring a defined benefit plan and focus on ways to stabilize defined benefit plan coverage. They also look into the need for changes in regulations governing defined contribution plans, offering a number of innovative policy solutions. Finally, they provide insight into the political and institutional constraints that may impede the creation of new pension legislation that could help to strengthen defined benefit plans and improve defined contribution plans.

304 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2007

About the author

Teresa Ghilarducci is an economist, author, and labor economist, and retirement security expert. Her widely circulated New York Times op-ed "Our Ridiculous Approach to Retirement" brought attention to her fresh and comprehensive critique of the America way of provisioning for retirement. Her book, When I'm 64: The Plot Against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them, presents her cutting-edge policy recommendations for restructuring the United States’ deteriorating retirement income security system. Her book Labor’s Capital: The Economics and Politics of Employer Pensions won an Association of American Publishers award in 1992. For the past five years, she has served as a court appointed trustee of the $50 billion retiree health care fund for ford, GM, and Chrysler retirees. Before coming The New School she was a professor at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Ghilarducci was the 2006–08 Wurf Fellow at Harvard Law School; her research has been funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, U.S. Department of Labor, Ford Foundation, and Retirement Research Foundation.