TULSA, Oklahoma: Tom Coomer has retired twice: once when he was 65, and then several years ago. Each time he realised that with just a Social Security cheque, “You can hardly make it these days.”

So here he is at 79, working full time at Walmart. During each eight-hour shift, he stands at the store entrance greeting customers, telling a joke and fetching a “buggy.” Or he is stationed at the exit, checking receipts and the shoppers that trip the theft alarm.

“As long as I sit down for about 10 minutes every hour or two, I’m fine,” he said during a break. Diagnosed with spinal stenosis in his back, he recently forwarded a doctor’s note to managers. “They got me a stool.”

The way major US companies provide for retiring workers has been shifting for about three decades, with more dropping traditional pensions every year. The first full generation of workers to retire since this turn offers a sobering preview of a labour force more and more dependent on their own savings for retirement.

Years ago, Coomer and his co-workers at the Tulsa plant of McDonnell-Douglas, the famed airplane maker, were enrolled in the company pension, but in 1994, with an eye toward cutting retirement costs, the company closed the plant. Now, The Washington Post found in a review of those 998 workers, that even though most of them found new jobs, they could never replace their lost pension benefits and many are facing financial struggle in their old age: One in seven has in their retirement years filed for bankruptcy, faced liens for delinquent bills, or both, according to public records.

Those affected are buried by debts incurred for credit cards, used cars, health care and sometimes, the college educations of their children.

Some have lost their homes.

And for many of them, even as they reach beyond 70, real retirement is elusive. Although they worked for decades at McDonnell-Douglas, many of the septuagenarians are still working, some full time.

Lavern Combs, 73, works the midnight shift loading trucks for a company that delivers for Amazon. Ruby Oakley, 74, is a crossing guard. Charles Glover, 70, is a cashier at Dollar General. Willie Sells, 74, is a barber. Leon Ray, 76, buys and sells junk.

“I planned to retire years ago,” Sells says from behind his barber’s chair, where he works five days a week. He once had a job in quality control at the aircraft maker and was employed there 29 years.

A preview of the US without pensions

“I thought McDonnell-Douglas was a blue-chip company – that’s what I used to tell people. ‘They’re a hip company and they’re not going to close.’ But then they left town – and here I am still working. Thank God I had a couple of clippers.”

Likewise, Oakley, a crossing guard at an elementary school, said she took the job to supplement her Social Security.

“It pays some chump change – $7 an hour,” Oakley said. She has told local officials they should pay better. “I use it for gas money. I like the people. But we have to get out there in the traffic, and the people at the city think they’re doing the senior citizens a favor by letting them work like this.”

Glover works the cash register and does stocking at a Dollar General store outside Tulsa to make ends meet. After working 27 years at McDonnell-Douglas, Glover found work at a Whirlpool factory, and then at another place that makes robots for inspecting welding, and also picked up some jobs doing AutoCAD drawing.

“I hope I can quit working in a few years, but the way it looks right now, I can’t see being able to,” Glover said recently between customers. “I had to refinance my home after McDonnell-Douglas closed. I still owe about 12 years of mortgage payments.”

For some, financial shortfalls have grown acute enough that they have precipitated liens for delinquent bills or led people to file for bankruptcy. None were inclined to talk about their debts.

“It’s a struggle, just say that,” said one woman, 72, who filed for bankruptcy in 2013. “You just try to get by.”

The notion of pensions – and the idea that companies should set aside money for retirees – didn’t last long. They really caught on in the mid-20th century, but today, except among government employers, the traditional pension now seems destined to be an artifact of US labour history.

The first ones offered by a private company were those handed out by American Express, back when it was stagecoach delivery service. That was in 1875. The idea didn’t exactly spread like wildfire, but under union pressure in the middle of the last century, many companies adopted a plan. By the 1980s, the trend had profoundly reshaped retirement for Americans, with a large majority of full-time workers at medium and large companies getting traditional pension coverage, according to Bureau of Labour Statistics data.

Then corporate America changed: Union membership waned. Executive boards, under pressure from financial raiders, focused more intently on maximising stock prices. And Americans lived longer, making a pension much more expensive to provide.

The average life expectancy in 1950 was 68, meaning that a pension had to pay out only three years past the typical retirement age of 65. Today, average life expectancy is about 79, meaning that the same plan would have to pay out 13 years past typical retirement age.

Exactly what led corporate America away from pensions is a matter of debate among scholars, but there is little question that they seem destined for extinction, at least in the private sector.

Even as late as the early 1990s, about 60 percent of full-time workers at medium and large companies had pension coverage, according to the government figures.

Bloomberg/Washington Post Service

Published in Dawn, December 26th, 2017