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A damning portrait of the dire realities of retirement in the United States - and how we can fix it. While the French went on strike in 2023 to protest the increase in the national retirement age, workers in the United States have all but given up on the notion of dignified retirement for all. Instead, Americans - whose elders face the highest risk of poverty compared to workers in peer nations - are fed feel-good stories about Walmart clerks who can finally retire because a customer raised the necessary funds through a GoFundMe campaign. Many argue that the solution to the financial straits of American retirement is simple: people need to just work longer. Yet this call to work longer is misleading in a multitude of ways, including its endangering of the health of workers and its discrimination against people who work in lower-wage occupations.
About the Author
Teresa Ghilarducci is a labor economist and nationally recognized expert in retirement security. She is the Bernard L. and Irene Schwartz professor of economics at The New School for Social Research and the director of The Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA) and The New School's Retirement Equity Lab (ReLab) .
