Working Poor

REFERRING TO A diverse and complex economic state, the term working poor encapsulates the experience of working individuals who, over a designated period of employment, persist in their inability to apply earned income to hoist themselves and dependent family members out of poverty. The definitions of working poverty are determined by the context and parameters of individual studies; however, the general consensus is that this emerging class was created by the socioeconomic circumstances it inherited from industrialism—a phenomenon that began in 17th-century Britain and spread to western Europe and North America in the 1800s.

Originating from the tradition of British concepts of class, the tiered categories of working class and poor have two historically contrasting definitions. These were most pronounced during the rise of industrialism in England starting as early as the late 18th century. Class categories had the function of showing the relationship between a citizen's personal income and the extent to which that income might establish meaningful participation in a consumer-based, capitalist society. In contrast to the substantially lower economic reputation of the poor—those who were living in a state of destitution or absolute want and depended on other people's charity as the primary means of survival—the working class often had the means to afford a more privileged or potentially comfortable lifestyle than the “deprived” underclass, providing them with a stronger voice for collective dissent and revolution.

Over the past 20 years, the increasing use of the term working poor has yielded a fusion between these two imagined classes (laborers and the poor). This hybrid concept thus began to question the belief that labor alone could secure independent self-sufficiency in a growing economy, while also signaling a crisis of labor faced by the working class of developed nations.

The modern use of the catchphrase, working poor, conveys several sociopolitical functions in a postindustrial world: first, it firmly evokes the contradiction inherent within the idea that people who work can also experience poverty, despite their attempts to acquire self-sufficiency through employment; second, it dethrones the biased myths that the poor are not laboring citizens and the poor lack success because they lack a work ethic; and third, it evokes a response among the populous, its government, and its policymakers to ensure justice for the working poor, that is, laborers struggling are given the tools needed to afford a decent livelihood. Despite its controversial political currency, as a community in need, the working poor carry on as a largely ignored, marginalized, and low-priority topic of national and worldwide debates on poverty.

The argument that more and more working people on the planet are living in poverty is still an item of minimal importance to the media and a vast number of its audiences, especially when this thesis exposes disturbing socioeconomic contradictions. The most distressing [Page 1180]of these is the paradox surrounding the rapid, global economic victory of the world market, which is nevertheless accompanied by the equally rapid reduction of income and wealth among the world's population.

This irony makes even more obvious the unequal distribution of resources between the world's rich and poor, both within and between nations, and has worked to further separate these upper and lower thresholds. In addition, the casualization, global division, and competitive outsourcing of labor, as well as the sinking real value of wages, fuels the persistent poverty among laborers in developing and already developed countries.

...