When Working Hard Simply Isn’t Enough: Employed Americans Who Fall Below the Poverty Line

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 6: How Precarity Impacts Workers

Abstract

In the United States, roughly 11% of Americans live below the poverty line. It is widely believed that poverty is the result of an individual’s failure to work hard enough to provide for themselves or their family—that if someone works hard enough, they should be able to provide for themselves financially. For the “working poor,” however, this is not the reality: working full time is not enough to bring them above the poverty line. Perceptions of the poor centralize around deservingness; the poor who are honest and hardworking (or physically unable to work) are perceived as deserving of help and support, unlike the undeserving poor, who are lazy, inadequate, or otherwise responsible for their own circumstances. Despite being deemed deserving, the existence of a working class who cannot meet their own needs at an individual or household level is contradictory to individualist explanations for the accumulation—or lack—of wealth. With household-level data from the one-year 2024 American Community Survey (ACS), this research will use logistic regression to understand the current social and demographic factors of working poverty. This work will model working poverty through household structure, education, rurality, race, and gender, among other factors. This analysis hopes to inform our understanding of working poverty in the US through the most recent ACS data.

Author

• Lauryn Wilde, Brigham Young University