Voice of America: Pensions an endangered species

VOA reports on the trend among private-sector employers of abandoning traditional pension benefits.

The number of Americans over the age of 65 is expected to double between now and 2030. This next generation of retirees will be the healthiest, best educated, and most affluent in American history. But many of them will not have a retirement benefit their parents' generation fought hard to get.

It is something known as a defined-benefit plan, or "pension." Retired workers who have a pension continue to be paid a certain percentage of their highest annual salary - usually anywhere from one to three percent - multiplied by the number of years they worked for the company.

***[Olivia Mitchell, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business] says she believes in the future, more and more employers are going to be abandoning defined-benefit plans in favor of defined-contribution plans. She says the one exception to this rule, though, could be the public-service sector. She says local, state, and federal government employees do not tend to change jobs quite as frequently as other American workers do - which is why public transportation workers in New York City recently went on strike in a bid to preserve their defined-benefit plans.