BLACK RETIREMENT SECURITY IN THE ERA OF DEFINED CONTRIBUTION PLANS: WHY AFRICAN AMERICANS NEED TO INVEST MORE IN STOCKS TO GENERATE THE SAVINGS THEY NEED FOR A COMFORTABLE RETIREMENT
Authors: Philip C. Aka and Chidera Oku
Retirement security is financial readiness for a worker after a lifetime of work. There was a time in the United States’ labor history when responsibility for that readiness lay mainly with employers who competed among themselves to retain the loyalty of their workforces by offering generous benefit packages to workers that instructively included retirement preparations. The situation changed with reduced job opportunities, which hit high notes during periods of economic upheavals, the Great Recession from December 2007 to June 2009 being one such example recently. Some of the lasting effect of these economic hard times was the shift in responsibility for retirement security from employers to individual workers.