Retirement Is a DOL Priority: Labor Secretary

That includes “thinking how to get more retirement participants into the retirement system in the first place,” Walsh said.

Many Americans, Walsh continued, “don’t have any retirement savings at all — or a plan at all right now in this country, and many of them are towards the end of their working career.”

Going deeper, he said, “there are major equity gaps.”

He noted that unemployment was higher among Black Americans and that only 36% of Black households ages 55 to 64 had any retirement savings.

For many Black households with at least one retirement account, he said, “there’s really nothing in it — it’s a very small number.” And only 30% of similar Hispanic households have retirement savings, Walsh said.

“This is a crisis,” he said. “This is a crisis that we have to address in the United States of America.”

In large part, he continued, “people don’t save for retirement because they don’t have the opportunity.”

Said Walsh: “For too long the main message to workers has been: ‘You’re not saving enough.’ And that may be true, but that’s certainly not the whole story as we think about it. It ignores the lack of access too many workers have … in the system that they’re working in. It stigmatizes. It shuts down the conversation. We need to open up the conversation.”

Retirement Security Roundtables

During this year’s retirement security roundtable discussions, Walsh said Labor learned of three main challenges:

• Lack of access to a retirement savings plan;
• The importance or portability. It’s “hard to take savings from job to job and [participants are] cashing out their savings,” he said, quoting EBRI research finding approximately $92 billion leaves the retirement system each year due to lack of portability.
• Lifetime income. “It’s hard to budget,” he said, “when you don’t know how long your money needs to last.”

Pictured: Labor Secretary Marty Walsh. (Photo: Bloomberg)