3 Highlights from The Working Poor

After taking part in Covenant House’s annual Sleep Out to end youth homelessness, I was recently inspired to reread The Working Poor: Invisible in America.

The Working Poor is a novel by David K. Shipler, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former New York Times foreign correspondent. In this national bestseller, Shipler gives his readers an intimate look into the lives of working American families who are desperately struggling to escape poverty.

So, who are the working poor?

The working poor, also known as the invisible poor, are the people engaged in America’s most respected activity—hard, honest work. In America, these workers are told that all their hard work will lead them to accomplish “the American dream.” But in reality, their hard work has led them to dead-end jobs with such low pay that they’re unable to properly feed their families or secure safe housing.

If you want an easy answer to the question “who are the working poor?” then just look around.

The working poor are people we see everyday. They’re frontline workers. They’re the ones our government now calls “essential workers,” even though they’ve never been treated like it. 

Before the pandemic started and before I first read this book, I never considered the fact that you could be working and still be poor. We’re taught to associate poverty with joblessness, but that’s not reality. In America today, there are over 7 million people who are officially recognized as “the working poor” by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That means nearly 5% of our workforce is living in poverty.

And one of the most important things I’ve learned over the years is that if you truly value inclusivity in the workforce and if you’re trying to build something that will support all workers, then you need to consider the experiences of every corner of the workforce. And that includes the working poor.

So here are my top three highlight from The Working Poor: Invisible in America that every C-level executive and every worker needs to know:

1. YOU CAN BE WORKING AND STILL BE POOR. 

There’s a lot of stereotypes around poverty and being poor. 

When the average person thinks about someone who’s poor, they likely conjure up images of someone who isn’t working, someone who’s lazy or lacks ambition, or someone who needs to get their priorities straight and simply try harder. Think about how old you were the first time you heard the phrase: “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.” Like I said, there’s a lot of stereotypes around being poor, and those stereotypes and assumptions are drilled into us at an early age.

And yes, the working poor are sometimes the victims of addiction or poor life choices. But in most cases, the working poor are single mothers and single wage-earners who have several children and very few options. 

In the book, Shipler contends that American culture misunderstands the causes of poverty; Poverty isn’t a result of personal failure. It’s a result of systemic barriers that stop people from accessing opportunities and education, and it’s a result of economic conditions that are out of worker’s control. 

The data on this speaks for itself. After the Great Recession, the number of working poor in the U.S. surged by 41%, and it took nearly a decade for this rate to drop back to pre-recession levels. By 2017 the number of working poor dropped 7% below the level in 2007, but the COVID-induced recession means all of that progress is going to be erased. It means that the number of working poor in America will likely skyrocket to levels even higher than after the Great Recession.

So things are going to get worse, but like Shipler writes in the book: the invisible poor “suffer in good times and bad.”

2. BEING POOR IS A FULL-TIME JOB.

Being poor is hard work. 

Imagine having to support your family on just $14,500 a year. That’s what a full-time, minimum-wage job pays in America today (and that’s before payroll taxes). The U.S. Census Bureau finds that a family of four needs to earn approximately $23,000 a year to live above the poverty line, which means that working full time, year-round at a minimum-wage job leaves you well below the poverty line. 

Workers in this position aren’t able to focus on their full-time job, because all day long they’re having to think about how they’re going to put dinner on the table that night and how they’re going to pay their rent and their debts and their bills. 

That’s why being poor is a full-time job.

3. Every C-level executive needs to be aware of their worker’s experiences.

Research shows that poverty creates a psychological burden so great that the poor are left with very little mental bandwidth to perform everyday tasks.

As a CEO, I want my employees to be focused on the job I hired them to do. Paying them a fair wage that’s well above the poverty line allows them to do that because then they don’t have to spend their time focused on how they’re going to cover their most basic needs. They have the mental bandwidth to perform tasks for work instead of being forced to constantly focus on survival.

If your workers aren’t focused, then your product will suffer and your productivity will suffer, which means that your customers and your bottom line will suffer too. So even if you’re a CEO whose sole motivator is profit, you still benefit from paying every single worker on your payroll a fair wage. 

So whether you’re an executive who truly cares about your workers, company culture, and inclusivity and diversity, or whether you’re an executive who’s just looking to make money—considering the personal experiences and the state of mind of every worker around you is really important. 

Of course I think every executive should care about their worker’s mental health and wellbeing, but we all know that in reality many of them simply don’t. C-level executives might not always care about their workers, but they do always care about making money. And if a certain part of your workforce is living in poverty and always coming to work stressed, then your customers are going to feel that stress too. And by extension, the financial health of your company is also at risk. 

So to my fellow CEOs and executives, it’s simple. Pay your workers a living wage, value every worker regardless of role, and prove that you value them through your actions. Do this and we can make sure the term “working poor” can one day become a thing of the past. 

If everything you’ve read here has inspired you to take action, you can join the movement to fight for equal opportunity, access, and respect for all workers by signing onto our national letter to Congress today.