A profile of the working poor (EXCERPT), Monthly Labor Review Online, Oct. 1989

A profile of the working poor

Bruce W. Klein and Philip L. Rones

Policymakers and researchers have been interested for a long time in the link between the labor market problems of workers and the economic status of their families. When workers are either unemployed or limited to part-time work, or when they have to work at very low wages, their personal finances suffer. But the impact on their families varies. In many cases, it may not be severe. At the extreme, however, several million families live below the official poverty level, even when some of their members are active in the work force. This situation is most common when only one family member works and earns low wages.

This article focuses on persons who are labor force participants but live in poor families. The labor market experiences and family circumstances of these persons are contrasted with those of persons in the work force who are not poor. Some general findings are as follows:

The working poor made up about one-third of all persons age 16 and over who were in poverty. These are the more than 6 million persons whose family income was below the official poverty level in 1987, even though they worked or looked for work at least half of the year.
Labor market problems such as unemployment or the inability to find full-time work are most likely to cause poverty when they occur in conjunction with low wages. Two-thirds of the working poor who usually work full time have weekly earnings that are below a "low-earnings" threshold used in this analysis.
The presence of more than one worker in a family dramatically lowers the probability of poverty. In particular, poverty is rare in husband-and-wife families where both are employed.
Unmarried women maintaining families are the workers with the greatest risk of living in poverty. Their earnings are rarely supplemented by those of other family members, and their wages, like those of women in general, are substantially lower than men's. Almost one-fourth of single-earner families maintained by women are poor.
Because education has a strong influence on earnings, individuals with low levels of schooling are overrepresented among the working poor. Most at risk are black workers and women, because, at every level of education, they have lower earnings than white men.

This excerpt is from an article published in the October 1989 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.

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Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey

Experimental poverty measurement for the 1990s.—Mar. 1998.

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Spending patterns of families receiving public assistance.—Apr. 1996.

Working and poor in 1990.—Dec. 1992.

Raising the minimum wage: effects on family poverty.—July 1990.

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