Ending Hunger in America, 2014 Hunger Report Full Report | Page 72

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, today’s fastest growing occupations require a
high school degree or less and pay poverty-level wages,1 meaning they are not enough to raise
a family of four, two parents and two children, above the poverty line. This is about $24,000
a year in 2014.2 But it’s easier to understand the economic reality of many families if we
translate that into wages: a job must pay about $12 an hour to enable a full-time, year-round
worker and her family to escape poverty.
In 2002, 23 percent of U.S. workers earned poverty-level wages. By 2012, that proportion
had climbed to 28 percent3 and
the average wage of workers in this
Figure 2.1 Share of All Working Families Living in Poverty
group was $8.66 an hour.4 Workers
in these low-wage jobs usually have
11%
no employer-sponsored health
Below 100% of poverty
10.6
10
insurance, no paid sick leave, and
10.0
no paid vacation days. They are
9.5
9
part of a group often called “the
8.8
8
working poor.” They embody an
8.1
economic reality that today seems
7
to be unique to the United States
6
among high-income nations. People
who live in poverty in other devel5
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
oped nations are almost always out
of work or the family member of
Source: Brandon Roberts, Deborah Povich and Mark Mather (2012), “Low-Income Working
someone who is.5 But in the United
Families: The Growing Economic Gap,” The Working Poor Families Project. Analysis of U.S.
States in 2011, more than 10 million
Census Bureau, American Community Survey data.
families with at least one member in
the workforce were living in poverty.6 See Figure 2.1. Low-wage workers and their families are,
by and large, the face of American poverty. If these 10 million workers had earned enough to put
them over the poverty line, the country would have had 58 percent fewer families in poverty.7
“Simply put, U.S. work and family policies have not been updated to reflect the new reality
of American family life,” explain Jane Waldfogel and Sara McLanahan, writing in the journal
The Future of Children published by Princeton University and the Brookings Institution.8 The
new reality of American family life is that too many jobs do not pay enough, do not enable
parents to balance work and family responsibilities, and do not provide workers with any
bargaining power to negotiate higher pay or more flexible schedules. The government policies now in place do not go far enough in addressing these problems.
“In virtually every area of work-family policy, provisions in the United States tend to be
less well developed and less equitably distributed than those in most peer countries,” say

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