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For nearly a decade, Ms. Schultz and her colleagues have been rooting through the minutiae of accounting regulations, government filings and corporate retirement plans to expose how many of the largest American companies have systematically plundered their employees’ pension funds, at once robbing their workers of hard-won benefits and enriching their own profits. Her work has led to Congressional hearings, to a Washington investigation or two and to numerous journalism awards.

Now, inevitably, comes the book. In “Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit From the Nest Eggs of American Workers” (Portfolio/Penguin, $26.95), Ms. Schultz herds all her journalistic cattle into a single corral, laying out by what any measure is a damning indictment of the broken pension promises too many American corporations have made to their workers. For anyone seriously interested in the retirement industry — and that’s what it amounts to, an industry — this book should be required reading.

 NYT