User:Amcook

citation stuff to add in: profile of the working poor--2000--http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2000.htm

income, poverty, and health insurance report--2009--http://www.census.gov/prod/2010pubs/p60-238.pdf

labor stat ILO manufacturing sector employment--http://laborsta.ilo.org/STP/guest

the population bulletin: us labor force trends---http://www.prb.org/pdf08/63.2uslabor.pdf

Greetings! This is Amanda's user page. To check out my class's page, click here.

Week 3 Assignment: Critically evaluate an article

I read the article on the working poor and left a few initial suggestions for how to improve it. Click here to see my comments, or just look at the copy-and-pasted version below:

Suggestions for reorganization

-This article could benefit from some updating and reorganization/expansion.


 * Updating: Need to update the Bureau of Labor Statistics figures.


 * Proposed reorganization/expansion: Intro / History of the term "working poor" / Working Poor in the US (subsections: overview, history, jobs typically held by the working poor, explanations for why these jobs are poorly paid, consequences of low pay on government aid programs) / Working Poor from a Cross-national perspective (see Brady, Fullerton, and Cross (2010) for data) / Policy responses (subsections: US, Canada, Europe, etc.)

--Amcook (talk) 00:54, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

Week 4 Assignment: Add a few sentences to an article, supported by citations

I began to edit the article on the working poor by including two new US definitions for the term "working poor." I used information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US Census Bureau, and Katherine Newman's No Shame in My Game to come up with these definitions. To give readers a better idea of the "poverty line," I uploaded a table from the US Census that shows the poverty thresholds for different kinds of households. I also added a link to the wiki page on the poverty line and uploaded a table. Click here to see my edits, or just look at the copy-and-pasted version below:

Definition in the United States

There are several popular definitions of "working poor" in the United States. According to the US Department of Labor, the working poor "are persons who spent at least 27 weeks [in the past year] in the labor force (that is, working or looking for work), but whose incomes fell below the official poverty level." The poverty threshold (the poverty line) is calculated based on the age and number of people living in a given household. In other words, the poverty line is different for individuals and families, and for people over and under the age of 65. Click for a breakdown of the US Census Bureau's poverty thresholds for 2009:

We might also define the working poor as minimum wage workers. This is not a perfect categorization, as many minimum wage workers are young people from middle class families or spouses of higher earning individuals. However, many minimum wage workers are the main breadwinners for their household [statistic needed]. In addition, many minimum wage jobs are part-time jobs. Thus, it is easy to see how a sizable portion of the working poor is made up of minimum wage workers. Thinking of the working poor as minimum wage workers can help us envision the kinds of jobs typically held by the working poor. For instance, food service workers, non-unionized retail workers, and janitors are often part of the working poor.

Week 5 Assignment: Add a bibliography to your article's talk page Click here to see the bibliography. I probably need to trim it down a bit, but I think this is a pretty exhaustive list of the important articles and books related to the working poor.

Week 6 Assignment: Start the article in your sandbox

I used the Luxembourg Income Survey to make a graph of working and non-working poverty in 12 countries. I defined "poverty" as less than 60% of the median household income for each country. A household is classified as "working" if the head of household was employed at the time of the survey. (This was the only available definition of "working" on the easily-accessible version of the Luxembourg Income Survey.)

Here is the graph:

I also came up with a better outline for the article:

1. defining working poverty:


 * -basic (universally used?) definition of poverty== your household earns 50% (or 60%) of the median household income of your country


 * -problems with this basic definition: doesn't take household size into account—logically speaking, larger households need more money


 * -advantage of this basic definition: it's commonly used, so it helps us compare working poverty rates across countries.

2. summary statistics: I'll try to make the following 3 graphs. The first graph will be easy to make because the data is already in Lohmann (2009). (Actually, I might choose to use the simpler graph that I already made--shown above--but I haven't decided yet.) In order to make the second and third graphs, I'll have to submit a special request--written in some kind of code--to the Luxembourg Income Survey. I'm not sure if I'll have time, but I'd like to do it if I can.
 * a current look:
 * -duplicate table from Lohmann (2009), which shows pre- and post-transfer working poverty rates


 * a longitudinal look:
 * -working poverty rates in the united states, canada, the UK, and Australia


 * occupation breakdown:
 * -what proportion of the working poor are in the agriculture, manufacturing, and service sectors? (US, Canada, the UK, and Australia)

3. qualitative studies


 * scope


 * -US urban centers


 * explanations


 * -rise of the service sector


 * -decline of the labor movement


 * -weak welfare state


 * proposed solutions


 * -create more job opportunities that offer a living wage


 * -grow the labor movement—lobby for higher wages and more employment protection


 * -improve the welfare state??

4. quantitative studies


 * scope


 * -cross-national studies of affluent democracies


 * explanations


 * -demographic characteristics


 * -welfare state generosity


 * -labor market institutions


 * -(a non-explanation): economic performance


 * proposed solutions


 * -push for a more generous welfare state


 * -grow the labor movement (may be necessary in order to push for a more generous welfare state. But may not be??  Look at countries with generous welfare states that have weak labor movements.)

5. areas for future research:


 * more longitudinal studies


 * -look at the rise of the service sector and employment subcontractors


 * more qualitative studies about non-US working poor?????


 * studies that take a closer look at what kind of specific welfare state policies reduce working poverty—in order to make policy recommendations, we probably need to choose a few specific welfare state policies that would make a big difference.


 * studies that consider the role of health and disability in working poverty

[REMOVE AND INCLUDE IN THE WIKI ARTICLE ON THE POVERTY LINE: Poverty Line in the United States
In the US, the official poverty level (also referred to as the poverty line or poverty threshold) is an absolute, rather than a relative, measure of poverty. That is, rather than looking at the distribution of income within US society, it uses a formula to determine the absolute amount of income an American household needs in order to meet their basic food, clothing, and shelter requirements. The current poverty threshold is set at three times the cost of the US Department of Agriculture's “thrifty food plan,” which is adjusted for changing costs of food every __ years [CITE]. It looks at households' pre-tax cash income (from wages and/or government aid) to determine whether they are eligible to receive government benefits such as food stamps, low-cost healthcare, low-cost childcare, subsidized housing, TANF, etc [CITE]. The poverty line varies depending on the age and number of people living in a given household. For example, the poverty line for a two-adult, two-child household is $21,756, but the poverty line for a single adult under the age of 65 is $11,161. Click for a breakdown of the US Census Bureau's poverty thresholds for 2009.

A common criticism of the official US measure of poverty is that it does not take regional variation of the cost of living and non-cash resources into account. An alternative measure of poverty, the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), was recently developed by an Interagency Technical Working Group (including the US Census Bureau and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics) and will now be used alongside the official poverty measure in order to gauge the effectiveness of government aid programs. The SPM looks at a wide range of expenses (taxes, childcare, housing, transportation) and cash and non-cash income (wages, child support, housing subsidies, TANF, Social Security Insurance, and medicare/medicaid). Both the official poverty measure and the SPM measure absolute poverty, but the SPM provides more detail.

'Limitations to Newman and Ehrenreich There are a couple of notable limitations to Newman and Ehrenreich's studies. First, both books focus exclusively on the low-wage service sector, which only accounts for ___% of the working poor. However, given the fact that financial hardships affect people in similar ways regardless of the particular work they are doing, it is possible to generalize the financial hardship findings to the working poor as a whole. Second, both books have a limited geographic scope, so the workplace dynamics they observe may not be representative of the United States as a whole. Evelyn Nakano Glenn's work on reproductive labor (domestic work and nursing) shows that a given job's characteristics can vary across regions and ethnic groups. She found that African American domestic workers in the South had significantly different work experiences than their Mexican American counterparts in the Southwest and their Japanese American counterparts in the Far West. Despite these limitations, No Shame in My Game and Nickel and Dimed have significantly furthered academic and popular understandings of the lived experiences of the working poor [CITE SOMETHING...--DO I NEED THIS PARAGRAPH?].

Both authors find that the working poor in the service sector struggle to cover even the most basic expenses, such as rent, electricity, transportation, healthcare, and childcare. In order to make ends meet, many low-wage workers rely on their social networks for cheaper housing, transportation, and free or low-cost childcare. A strong theme in Newman's account, which is reflected in the title of her book (No Shame in My Game) is that the working poor have a strong work ethic, even though their jobs as fast-food workers are socially stigmatized and have little chance for upward mobility.