A damning portrait of the dire realities of retirement in the United States—and how we can fix it.

While the French went on strike in 2023 to protest the increase in the national retirement age, workers in the United States have all but given up on the notion of dignified retirement for all. Instead, Americans—whose elders face the highest risk of poverty compared to workers in peer nations—are fed feel-good stories about Walmart clerks who can finally retire because a customer raised the necessary funds through a GoFundMe campaign.

Many argue that the solution to the financial straits of American retirement is simple: people need to just work longer. Yet this call to work longer is misleading in a multitude of ways, including its endangering of the health of workers and its discrimination against people who work in lower-wage occupations. In Work, Retire, Repeat, Teresa Ghilarducci tells the stories of elders locked into jobs—not because they love to work but because they must.

But this doesn’t need to be the reality. Work, Retire, Repeat shows how relatively low-cost changes to how we finance and manage retirement will allow people to truly choose how they spend their golden years.

Foreword by E. J. Dionne Jr.

Part I: How the Working-Longer Consensus Made the Retirement Crises Worse
Chapter 1: The Erosion of Retirement and the Rise of Retirement Inequality
Chapter 2: The Shift to Retirement Insecurity

Part II: The Hidden Costs of Working Longer
Chapter 3: Working Longer Is Often Not a Choice
Chapter 4: Working Longer Can Harm Your Health
Chapter 5: Working Longer Creates Unequal Retirement Time
Chapter 6: Working Longer Does Little to Improve Retirement Security
Chapter 7: When Older Workers Lose, All Workers Lose
Chapter 8: The High Cost of Bad Pensions

Part III: The Gray New Deal
Chapter 9: Good Jobs for Older Workers
Chapter 10: Creating Better Pensions

Notes
Bibliography
Index