A battle to hold on to pensions — and the dreams they carried

They thought they were the lucky ones — truck drivers and warehouse workers who counted themselves among the dwindling number of Americans still guaranteed a private pension.

But that promise of a monthly check, once considered ironclad, is now in doubt for more than a million retirees and older workers nationwide, including tens of thousands in Massachusetts and neighboring states. Their underfunded pension plans are creeping toward insolvency, putting benefits they earned over the course of a career at risk of being cut or even eliminated.

For people like Bob Connors, 64, who spent decades unloading cases of beer at the Anheuser Busch warehouse in Medford, that’s brought uncertainty at a stage of life he had figured would be less stressful.

“I’m trying to be frugal, less travel and eating out, because I don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Connors, a Medford resident and Teamsters union member who retired two years ago. He’s collecting a pension that’s enabled him to delay taking Social Security. “If it gets cut, I might have to go back to work or sell my house.”

Beyond the pensions of local Teamsters, hundreds of other retirement plans offered by large US companies or groups of smaller ones are struggling. Some have frozen contributions for veteran employees and stopped offering the retirement benefit to new hires.

“We’re looking at the death rattle of pensions in the private sector,” said Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, who cowrote a recent report on the decline of a little-known class of benefits called multiemployer pension plans, which have been particularly hard hit. “These plans are going to run out of money. Employers have decided they’re cumbersome, and they don’t want to assume the risk.”

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