Working…and Poor
Featured Guest Blogger August 1st, 2008
Last year I had the privilege of being a teaching assistant for Lisa Dodson in the Sociology department here at Boston College. The course was titled, “From Poor Laws to Working Poor: The world of low-income America.” Lisa was an incredible mentor not only to her students, but also to me.
Being in the work-family field, I am often inundated (happily so) with research, conversation, and policies surrounding flexible schedules, telework, employer-sponsored child care, and other family-friendly topics. Arguably, some of these topics may be more relevant to middle- and upper-class workers than the working poor. In my time with Lisa, I found myself so excited to be immersed in the course materials and her stories of her work with low-income individuals, as low-income working families were one of the primary reasons I sought my MSW a few years prior. I felt like I was going back to my roots.
So, I would like to share a couple of online resources with you on the topic. In terms of literature, I have to draw everyone’s (okay, the readers of this blog’s…) attention to the Urban Institute’s Low-income Working Families Project. They have an entire webpage dedicated to recent reports on topics ranging from job loss, to getting ahead and health insurance.
Recently, I also came across the Working Poor Families Project (WPFP), which supports the efforts of state nonprofit organizations to strengthen state policies that can assist low-income workers to achieve economic security and become produc¬tive participants in the economy. Here are some interesting facts that they report:
• One in four working families is low-income.
• Forty percent of minority working families are low-income, twice the percentage of white working families.
• Of all children in working families, one third are in low-income working families.
• A married couple heads more than half of low-income working families.
On the Network, we have statistics, definitions, encyclopedia entries, links, and plenty of reading on the working poor.
Feel free to let us know of any other resources that we can share here around the ‘blog table.’ We all know someone who is working, and poor. As scholars, policymakers, business leaders, and members of society, let’s pay attention to this issue.
