Lucent, for instance, has only 20,000 active workers in the United States to generate the business needed to help support nearly 120,000 retirees, whose health care last year cost about $775 million, an amount equal to 70 percent of Lucent's net profit. So the company has been aggressively paring the health insurance it offers its retirees, prompting older employees to rethink their retirement plans.
"We simply cannot afford to absorb U.S. retiree health care costs at this level and remain a sustainable, competitive company," Lucent notified its management retirees last September in explaining a new round of health benefit cuts.
As companies have whittled away at benefit packages, they have pushed their retirees back to work.
The first step was the dismantling of many traditional pensions: the defined-benefit plans that offer a predetermined monthly income after retirement, and usually offer incentives for early retirees.
Companies have been steadily replacing such plans with defined-contribution plans in which workers save a portion of their pay for retirement tax-deferred, and companies contribute a partial match.
As recently as 1979, the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College found more than 80 percent of the workers covered by a company retirement plan had a defined-benefit pension. By 2001, the percentage had dropped to a little over 40 percent.
The dismantling of traditional defined-benefit pensions left many older workers -- who had accumulated pension credit under the old system -- feeling short-changed. "They did us wrong," said Mr. Lemoine, who says that a realignment of AT&T's pension plan in 1996 slashed his benefits. He joined a retiree organization that is supporting a lawsuit against AT&T over the changes.
According to Stephen Bruce, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, Mr. Lemoine's final pension -- valued by the company at $135,000, which he took as a $70,500 lump sum plus $402 a month -- was less than half of what he would have been due under the previous defined-benefit system.
Citing the lawsuit, an AT&T spokesman said the company could not comment on the matter.
Health Benefits Hold Sway
Even more critical has been the collapse of company-paid health insurance for retirees, prodding growing numbers of workers to hang on to some job, almost any job, to keep their health coverage until Medicare kicks in at 65.
In 1988, two-thirds of all large employers offered health benefits to retirees; last year only about one-third did. And employers who offer coverage are forcing workers to shoulder more of the cost. In 2004, 79 percent of them increased their retirees' premiums. A survey by Watson Wyatt, a corporate-benefits consulting firm, found that the absence of company-financed retiree health insurance increased the average retirement age by two years for women and 1.5 years for men.
"In this day and age," said Jonathan Gruber, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "retiree health insurance is perhaps the biggest single determinant of retirement."
Mr. Janson, the former Lucent engineer, agrees with that. Even though he has two teenage daughters at home and his wife, Mary, does not work outside the home, he could afford to stay retired, he said, as long as Lucent kept paying for his family's health insurance. But last year Lucent stopped paying for his dependents' coverage. That left him with an extra monthly bill of about $500.
"We were making it before they took medical away," Mr. Janson said. "It's kind of like the company pulling the rug out from under me now."
Mr. Janson is also suffering because he put most of his retirement savings into Lucent stock. Shares he bought at $80 are now trading at less than $4 and his nest egg - worth about $700,000 in 1999, he said - is now less than $150,000.
For Americans heading into retirement, the contrast to the previous generation is stark. The typical household headed by a 47- to 64-year-old is poorer today, in constant dollars, than a similar household was in 1983. The main reason is the disappearance of the traditional pension, according to Edward N. Wolff, a New York University economist who analyzed Federal Reserve wealth data.
Mr. Lemoine is lucky that AT&T still offers health insurance that covers his family, even though the monthly premium of $421.52 is more than his pension check. A head injury in a car accident in August ended his stints as a security guard and part-time X-ray technician.
That shifted the financial burden of a four-teenager household onto his wife, Susan, 41, who draws a modest salary as a paralegal. Mr. Lemoine's 80-year-old mother also pitches in, lending the family money.
The ordeal has profoundly changed Susan Lemoine's outlook on the future.
"I will work," she said, "until the day I die."