The first half of this year has been defined by the coronavirus and our collective response to it. Its impact has been felt in ways far beyond our nation’s health after just a few months, leaving many employers wondering how they can safely move forward. But the unprecedented economic damage is also raising an important question about the future of work: Should an increased focus on physical safety be accompanied by more protections for workers’ finances? When it comes to retirement plans, the answer is absolutely.
The United States has now experienced three major recessions in the past twenty years. Before the current COVID crisis, we began this century with the bursting of the ‘dot com’ bubble in 2001, a reference to the failure of early internet companies that built out infrastructure for the web. That year also included the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., further slowing business investment and travel and bringing the prior decade of growth to an end. Six years later, the prolonged ‘Great Recession’ beginning in 2008 following a meltdown in home mortgages led to a financial crisis requiring hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds to keep our financial system afloat.
