A policy brief released this morning by The Working Poor Families Project has employed Census Bureau reports to add to a growing trove of data showing how rough the Great Recession has been on Americans. While the recession is officially over, its impact continues.
More than half of the U.S. labor force (55 percent) has “suffered a spell of unemployment, a cut in pay, a reduction in hours or have become involuntary part-time workers” since the recession began in December 2007. Measuring the direct impact of the recession on working families is difficult because there are broader social, economic and demographic factors at work, many of which predate the recent economic decline.
But it’s clear from the data that conditions for working families deteriorated after 2007. The proportion of working families below 200 percent of the poverty threshold increased sharply in 2008 and again in 2009, as many middle-class families fell into the low-income trap. just between 2008 and 2009, the number of low-income working families increased by nearly a quarter of a million (246,000), adding another 1.7 million to the number of people living in low-income working families. ...
In 2009, there were about 45 million people living in low-income working families, including more than 22 million children. In just one year, from 2008 to 2009, the number of children in low-income working families increased by more than 700,000.
Children living in poverty tend to have worse health and educational outcomes than children growing up in more affluent families. For many children, poverty persists into adolescence and adulthood, and is associated with higher risks of dropping out of school, teens having children and lower earnings for young adults. Nationwide, more than 1 in 3 children in working families (35 percent) are low-income.
Written by Brandon Roberts and Deborah Povich, the brief from the 8-year-old organization also noted:
• The share of working families that are low-income increased from 28 to 30 percent from 2007 to 2009.
• Forty-three percent of working families with at least one minority parent were low-income in 2009, nearly twice the proportion of white working families. For both white and minority working families, the proportion below 200 percent of the poverty threshold increased by 2 percentage points from 2007 to 2009.
• Income inequality continued to grow in 2009, with the richest 20 percent of working families taking home 47 percent of all income and earning 10 times that of low-income working families.
It's almost tiresome to have to repeat that the acute problems pointed out in this report are firmly grounded in three decades of government policies that have promoted stagnant wages, off-shored jobs, union-busting, soaring income-and-wealth inequality, a weakened safety net, all of it combined with a relentless drive to keep going in the same direction. Most of our leaders fail to respond. Thus, this demolition juggernaut continues apace despite the impact it has and will continue to have on our economic well-being and, as Roberts and Povich say, "potentially even our cohesiveness as a nation."
It's not that there are no workable solutions. But deploying them will require far more than simple persuasion. Because these solutions are inimical to the interests of the beneficiaries of the policies that have brought us to this state of affairs. Like the powerful throughout human history, they will not release their grip willingly. It will take a sturdy, unified and relentless progressive movement to wrest power from those who have run roughshod over the majority of Americans for their own ends, using all the tools at their command. Every contribution we make to weakening that movement, to buying into their propaganda, to dividing ourselves along class, race and gender lines, and to all sorts of other internecine fighting gives them reason to smile. And that delays the day of reckoning.