Precarious Lives by Arne L. Kalleberg

Author:Arne L. Kalleberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509506538
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

Poverty

Unlike low-wage jobs, poverty is a household-level concept: Someone can be working in a low-wage job and still not be considered poor if there are other family members (such as a spouse) who are working and whose earnings may help to compensate for the low wages. Brady, Fullerton, and Cross (2010), for example, show that not having multiple earners in the household makes it more likely that the household will be poor.2 Hence, the income that is available to a household is likely to be more salient for a worker’s and her or his family’s degree of economic insecurity than working in a low-wage job.

The OECD defines the poverty rate as the percentage of people whose household income is below 50 percent of the median household income of the total population. Figure 5.2 shows the poverty rates for the six countries for two time periods (2000 and 2011), obtained from OECD statistics and based on this definition. The rates presented here refer to the proportions who are considered poor after taking into consideration the taxes people in the various countries pay on their income and any transfers (such as welfare payments) that might help to supplement their incomes. These figures thus take into consideration not only differences among countries in earnings quality (as in figure 5.1), but also the number of earners in a household as well as the generosity of welfare payments.

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