Low-Wage America: An Overview

T his volume describes changes in the workplace for Americans who do not earn enough to support themselves and their families. The number of such workers is substantial. In 2001 about 34 million Americans, 23.9 percent of the labor force, earned less than $8.70 an hour (Mishel, Bernstein, and Boushey 2003, table 2.9). Working full-time for the entire year at this wage produces annual earnings of just $17,400—about equal to the poverty line for a family of four, and not nearly enough to sustain most working families. For example, a family with two parents and two children requires between $27,000 and $52,000 annually in order to maintain a basic standard of living, depending on the community; the national median is about $33,500. For a single working parent with two children, a basic family budget ranges from $22,000 to $48,600. Overall, in the late 1990s, fully 29 percent of working families with children under twelve had incomes lower than the basic family budget for their communities. 1 As the chapters in this volume document, firms in all parts of the economy—in manufacturing, in retail sales, in telecommunications , in the hospitality industry, and in the health care industry— employ workers at wages below those needed to meet the basic family budget threshold. Low-wage workers are employed in a wide variety of occupations. They work as nursing assistants, food pre-parers and servers, customer service representatives, assembly-line workers, and housekeepers, and they include men and women from every racial and ethnic group. The majority of low-wage workers in the United States have no educational credentials beyond a high school diploma. Many, including a large number of immigrants, lack even this credential. For this reason, we often refer to the frontline workers who are the