Washington, D.C. – Labor Day 2026 marks 52 years since President Gerald Ford signed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA, Pub. L. 93-406) into law on Labor Day, September 2, 1974 — a law he said would give workers “much more clearly defined rights to pension funds and greater assurances that retirement dollars will be there when they are needed.” A new paper from the Consumer Policy Center, ERISA at 52: Where Is the Employer-Sponsored System Going, And Who Is It Leaving Behind?, argues that promise remains unmet for a large and identifiable share of American workers.
The paper, by Dallas L. Salisbury — founding Chief Staff Executive of the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) from 1978 to 2015, now a Senior Fellow at the Consumer Policy Center — updates a keynote he delivered at the American Bar Association’s JCEB Symposium in 2004. Drawing on new data from the Social Security Administration, the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, Census SIPP, and KFF, it traces what Salisbury calls a “structural transformation that no one explicitly chose”: the collapse of traditional pension coverage, the rise of the 401(k) and its persistent adequacy gaps, and growing reliance on Social Security among older Americans.
Key Findings:
- Social Security is doing more of the work than ever. In 2024, retired workers received an average of $23,704 a year ($1,976/month) in benefits; nine in ten Americans 65 and older received them, and three in five relied on Social Security for at least half their income. Replicating that guaranteed, inflation-adjusted income stream from a private insurer at 2026 annuity rates would cost roughly $500,000 to $600,000.
- Wealth conceals a bottom-quartile crisis. Median net worth for households aged 65–74 reached $409,900 in 2022 (Federal Reserve SCF) — but the bottom quartile of older households, those with incomes under $25,000, had 25th-percentile net worth of only about $15,000 after liabilities.
- Retirement plan design shifted risk to workers with little parallel consumer protection. Traditional pensions guaranteed lifetime income and survivor benefits with no cash-out option; 401(k) plans are tax-advantaged savings accounts that shift investment and longevity risk to the individual. The paper argues these were never equivalent products, even though law and policy increasingly treated them as “two ways to do retirement.”
- Recent legislation shows real, if incomplete, progress. The paper credits the SECURE Act (Pub. L. 116-94, 2019) and SECURE 2.0 (Pub. L. 117-328, 2022) — including the new Saver’s Match, projected by Pew to reach 22 million Americans — and state auto-IRA programs, now enrolling more than one million workers with $2.75 billion in assets, as evidence that automatic, default-driven design works. It raises consumer-protection questions about newer, voluntary-enrollment vehicles such as Trump Accounts (IRC § 530A, created by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Pub. L. 119-21) and the TrumpIRA.gov marketplace directed by an April 30, 2026 executive order, noting that without automatic enrollment, participation tends to concentrate among workers already better positioned to save.
The paper’s final section makes a normative case, distinct from its data findings, for extending consumer-protection frameworks already standard in mortgage, insurance, and securities markets — including a best-interest standard for advice given at the point of distribution or rollover — into the retirement system.
“The question in 2004 was whether the political will existed to use the consumer protection tools available to us. Twenty-two years later, that is still the question,” said Salisbury. “We have fifty-two years of data showing this is not one uniform retirement crisis — it’s a targeted one, concentrated among workers without continuous employer coverage, without home equity, and without access to advice that has to work in their interest rather than someone else’s.”
