Want to take bets on how soon it becomes the "national taxpayer's" problem?
Well, California's public pensions aren't exactly the private pensions the OP was talking about, now are they?
What's wrong with America's pensions is that they've been used and abused as a way to keep people working for less when they had incentive to either strike or go elsewhere. The people at the top turn pension promises down the road into immediate profit for themselves, very large profits, and hit the door running. That's true wrt GM's over promised plan, or California's.
Another problem with it all is that market profits are increasingly channeled to nimble market insiders who sell short, something pensions have trouble doing- pensions necessarily take long positions in the market, take a heavy beating every time the market flips, only partially recover when the market goes up. Think of it as a pumping action... money flows in slowly, gets squeezed out quickly, and then refills, only to get pumped out again... wash, rinse, repeat until the reservoir, pension contributors, gets sucked dry... It's a financial milking machine.
Factor in decreasing pension plan membership created by outsourcing and offshoring to get a glimpse of the full effect...
Screw the working guy, the guy who shows up and does his job for years on end? Oh yeh- you betcha...
The notion that 401K's will serve people any better is folly. Yeh, sure, individuals have more "control", or at least the illusion of control, but very few have the time or the expertise to exercise that, and are still stuck in fundamentally long positions. Add some divide and conquer to high fund management fees... and there you are, living the bosses' new pension plan, the work 'til you die plan...