Low wage and income workers are both less likely to receive employer benefits and less likely to receive public benefits

“Three decades of stagnating earnings for bottom deciles of male wage earners and
1990s anti-poverty policies promoting employment among poor single mothers
suggest increases in the ranks of low-wage breadwinners living in low-income
households. Low-wage workers often get few employer sponsored benefits, while antipoverty programs target poor non-earners; these factors suggest low-wage and lowincome workers may be unprotected by employer or government supports” write Randy Albelda and Michael Carr in Low-Wage and Low-Income Workers In The U.S., 1979-2009 on scholarworks.umb.edu. (Adapted excerpts by Job Market Monitor to follow)

Using the Annual Economic and Social Extracts of the Current Population Survey (CPS) from 1980-2010, the authors explore changes in low-income and low-wage earners by gender and family status.

The authors find a growth in low-wage and low-income workers for all family statuses over the last three decades, controlling for demographic and human capital characteristics. They also find that for a set of employer and government supports, these workers are the most likely to fall “betwixt and between” eligibility for anti-poverty supports and receiving employer benefits.

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Figure 1 depicts the share of positive earners 18 years and older who were low wage, low income and both low-wage and low-income (LW/LI), respectively, from 1979 through 2009 drawn from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of
the Current Population Survey (collected in 1980 through 2010). The percentage of adult workers who are LW/LI is between 9.7 and 13.3, hovering between 12 and 13 percent for most of the period. As a percent of all workers, those who are lowwage increased in the early 1980s, stabilizing at about 28 percent in the early 1990’s. Conversely, the percentage of workers who are low-income has dropped from a high of close to 25 percent in 1982 to a low of 17.4 percent in 2009. Over the entire period, 44 percent of workers who were low-wage were also low-income while 61 percent of those who were lowincome were also low-wage. From 1979 to 2009, the
number of positive wage earners grew 38.0 percent from 105.6 million to 145.7 million, while the number of low-wage and low-income workers has grown 52 percent from 10.8 million to 16.4 million.

Government and employer supports for low-wage and low-income workers

To the degree that workers who earn low wages and reside in a low-income family are the newly vulnerable, their ranks are growing especially among those who are the only earners in their families, but also among those who are likely to be primary earners. That the share of LW/LI men, including married men with children (those thought to be traditional breadwinners), is increasing is consistent with the earnings literature that consistently finds wage stagnation of male earners at the bottom of the wage ladder. But the fastest growing and among the highest levels of LW/
LI workers are those who are considered to be nontraditional breadwinners, namely single parents.

This group was specifically targeted to engage in employment in the mid-1990s as a means of “selfsufficiency” and improved economic conditions. If wages are low and family income is also low, are these LW/LI workers, especially breadwinners,
likely to supplement their earning through access to social protections in the form of voluntary employer benefits and/or government supports?

The authors find that, LW/LI workers are both less likely to receive employer benefits and less likely to receive public benefits, leaving them in a particularly precarious economic position.

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