Before the economic crisis hit, I often heard from friends and readers who were sanguine about their retirement savings plans but worried that their traditional pensions wouldn’t be there when they retired. What’s happened, of course, is that traditional plans that pay benefits for life have turned out to be much safer than other retirement savings plans.

In traditional benefit plans, the amount of money you receive in retirement is “defined,” usually by a formula that involves your age, how many years you work for the company and your salary in your highest earning years. In retirement savings plans like 401(k)s, the amount you’re allowed to contribute tax-free is defined by law and by your employer, but nothing guarantees how much—if any—money you’ll have in retirement.

Unfortunately, traditional pension plans have become increasingly rare. Between 1993 and 2007, in fact, the percentage of workers covered by traditional plans dropped from 32 to 20 percent, as 401(k)s and similar savings plans became popular among employers. “For more and more workers, this means that risk—in terms of steady retirement income—has been transferred from the employer to the eventual retiree,” noted the Bureau of Labor Statistics in reporting the numbers.

I think it’s fair to say that now we realize what a risk that is. It’s even become part of our popular culture: One recent installment of Blondie, a comic strip started during the Great Depression, featured Dagwood, surrounded by neighbors, everyone’s hair standing on end as they opened their 401(k) statements.

Originally, retirement savings plans were meant to complement traditional pensions and Social Security. But they started to supplant traditional pensions once employers recognized their benefits. And the benefits—to employers—were substantial. A U.S. Labor Department study in 2000 found that in 1974, companies were paying 89 percent of the costs of worker retirement. Twenty-five years later, with the growth in savings plans, employers’ costs for retirement had dropped to 49 percent.

If you are one of the lucky ones still covered by a traditional pension plan, you can breathe easy, even in a lousy economy: If your employer goes broke and files to reorganize or to liquidate in bankruptcy, your pension is protected. It is insured by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC), backed by premiums collected from companies that have such pensions.

“Relatively few people lose benefits in a plan termination,” says Frank Todisco, senior pension fellow for the American Academy of Actuaries. Actuaries assess risk as part of their job, so they tend to be good judges of such things.

In fact, according to a study by the PBGC, approximately 85 percent of participants whose plans were acquired by the agency between 1995 and 2005 received the full pension they were promised. The PBGC caps single-employer pension plans at $54,000 annually, so workers who would have received more than that will get a lower payment if the PBGC takes over. For those who did lose a portion of their pension, the average reduction was 28 percent.

Still, the current economic crisis may put more stress on the system. The PBGC already has a deficit and, given the troubles in the markets in which the agency is also an investor, the deficit could go higher. And changes in the law that would increase funding levels for some pension plans this year need to be reversed to help companies weather the current turbulence in the marketplace, according to the American Benefits Council, a trade association that represents employers on benefit issues.

"Even though we're going through this time of economic turbulence, PBGC hasn't seen an increase in companies ending their defined benefit plans," says spokesman Marc Hopkins. And more companies may freeze their pension plans, which means whatever an employee has earned stays intact but there are no future increases to pension benefits. For instance, if a company freezes a plan, an employee who had worked there only five years would have very little in the way of pension benefits even if he stayed with the company another 25 years. He might have a retirement savings plan, but those benefits would depend on how his investments performed over the years.

All in all, the nearly 44 million American workers at 29,000 private-sector companies whose plans are protected by the PBGC should be thankful for that extra layer of assurance. If you are close to retirement age, you can count on your pension instead of counting the number of extra years you need to work to make up for lost savings.

Martha M. Hamilton, formerly with the Washington Post, writes a regular column, Your Financial Future, for AARP Bulletin Today.