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When it comes to being retirement-ready, a new report shows New York workers are woefully unprepared. Dr. Teresa Ghilarducci of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School says only 40 percent of workers in the city have access to an employer-based retirement plan like a pension or 401k. That's well below the national average of 53 percent, and she says this is not a trend that can be blamed solely on the recession.

“I was shocked to find out that the decline in retirement plan coverage started around year 2000, and it's just been steadily declining, and that's actually true in the U.S. as well,” says Dr. Ghilarducci.

But consider this: 35 percent of New York workers do participate in an employer-based plan—a telling number when only 40 percent have that option.

City Comptroller John Liu, whose office published the report, says it's clear people want to save.

“It indicates for the most part, for the vast majority of employees who have access to an employer plan, they will participate. So it's not so much that employees don't want to participate, it's that more times than not, they don't have access,” says Liu.

The second part of the problem is that workers don't have enough savings—at least not enough to retire on.

“36 percent of New York workers have less than $10,000 available for retirement, and these are older workers,” says Dr. Ghilarducci.

As a result, she says the city can expect more and more older New Yorkers to rely solely on Social Security when they retire, if they retire at all.

“They will probably look for work to supplement their retirement plan or more likely they will just do with less,” says Dr. Ghilarducci. “We'll just have a lot more impoverished older people in what we economists call a chronic state of want. They'll be poor or near poor.”

Liu says this is a pending problem the city can't afford to ignore.

“It's a question that should be addressed now. We need to figure out how to help workers prepare during their actual careers for their eventual retirement,” says Liu.

Over the next few months, he says his office will be looking at what other states are doing to address this issue to see what ideas, if any, could be brought to New York.