Playing roulette with retirement

That famous economist Teresa Heinz Kerry writing in the Boston Globe warns about the elimination of pensions:

putting retirement planning in the hands of workers with no financial training and staking retirement funds on a game of Wall Street roulette makes retirement look a lot worse for real people . Companies, and the federal government, should be looking for ways to rationalize the payment of defined-benefit plans so that it takes into account both the needs of companies -- and the need for workers to have a determined income stream.

Just how companies are supposed to support defined-benefit plans when they don't know consumer demand for their products thirty years from know isn't explained.Maybe workers can marry two members of Skull and Bones.