The Economic Consequences of Homelessness in The US

(2010) accessed this data through the Luxembourg Income Study. This graph measures
household, rather than person-level, poverty rates. A household is coded as "poor" if its
income is less than 50% of its country's median income. This is a relative, rather than
absolute, measure of poverty. A household is classified as "working" if at least one
member of the household was employed at the time of the survey. The most important
insight contained in this graph is that the US has strikingly higher working poverty rates
than European countries.
Risk factors
There are five major categories of risk factors that increase a person's likelihood of
experiencing working poverty: sectoral factors, demographic factors, economic factors,
labor market institutions, and welfare generosity. Working poverty is a phenomenon that
affects a very wide range of people, but there are some employment sectors,
demographic groups, political factors, and economic factors that are correlated with
higher rates of working poverty than others. Sectoral and demographic factors help
explain why certain people within a given country are more likely than others to be
working poor. Political and economic factors can explain why different countries have
different working poverty rates.
Sectoral
tendencies
Working poverty is not distributed equally among employment sectors. The service
sector has the highest rate of working poverty. In fact, 13.3% of US service sector
workers found themselves below the poverty line in 2009. Examples of low-wage
service sector workers include fast-food workers, home health aids, waiters/waitresses,
and retail workers.
Page 54 of 289