Working Poverty Risk Factors for U.S. Elders in the Great-Recession Era Jo Mhairi Hale, Christian Dudel, & Angelo Lorenti Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research Objectives : Many more Americans experience working poverty than unemployed poverty, yet little research in the U.S. focuses on this group. The Great Recession only exacerbated working poverty, especially for older workers. We hypothesize older workers with lower human capital would be even more at risk. We test the hypothesis that those who experience greater life-course disadvantage (e.g., lower early-life SES, People of Color) will have a higher risk of working poverty and longer expectancy in working poverty after the Great Recession than those who are less disadvantaged. Method : Analyzing the U.S. Health and Retirement Survey, we use for causal mediation analysis to decompose the effect of early-life SES on risk of working poverty into the direct effect and the indirect effect that operates through the association between early-life SES and educational and occupational attainment. Results : Preliminary results indicate an increase in working poverty for those aged 50-70 at the time of the Recession, especially for POC. Causal mediation analysis suggests those in the lowest early-SES quartile compared to the higher quartiles were 22% more likely to experience working poverty, net of race/ethnicity/sex, education, occupation, and age. Only 35% of the association between early-SES and working poverty is mediated through education/occupation, evidence for our hypothesis that early-SES has a long-lasting impact on working poverty. In general all subgroups who originate in lower-SES are predicted to spend a greater percent of their working expectancy in working life poverty than their high-SES counterparts, net of education and occupation. Women in the lowest three early-SES quartiles are estimated to spend significantly longer share of their working life expectancy in working poverty during the Recession than before. Discussion : When people experience economic hardship (e.g., the Great Recession), lack of familial wealth and low human/social capital places people who originate in lower socioeconomic statuses, especially People of Color (POC) (Bloome 2014; Conley 1999; Neckerman and Torche 2007; Western et al. 2012), in more precarious economic positions. 1
Working Poverty Risk Factors for U.S. Elders in the Great-Recession Era Although most people transition in and out of poverty spells, a small subset of Americans are chronically poor (Magnuson and Votruba-Drzal 2009; Stevens 2012) despite working (Brady et al. 2010). In the U.S., there are four times more people in working poverty than in poor households where no one is working (Brady et al. 2010). Older displaced workers experienced the largest earnings declines in the wake of the Great Recession (Farber 2011). Researchers have paid less attention to these working poor (Burgard and Kalousova 2015; Crettaz 2013) even though they represent an increasing share of the U.S. population and are almost a hallmark of the Great Recession era (Brady et al. 2010). Lee and colleagues (2005) use earlier waves of the Health and Retirement Survey to develop a sociodemographic profile of middle-aged working poor, defined as aged 51-61. However, they consider primarily contemporary predictors, e.g., age, sex, race, marital status, and net worth, only including respondent’s own educat ion as an early-life predictor, and, of course, the Great Recession had not yet become a factor. We draw on three main bodies of literature to motivate our study: social mobility, intersectionality, and life course studies. Research on social mobility and the intergenerational transmission of poverty ranges from analyses of individual-level data to determine which factors are most predictive of life outcomes to cross-national studies of social mobility (Blau and Duncan 1967; Hout and DiPrete 2006; Sewell et al. 1970). Intersectionality theory reminds us that in studying socioeconomic status (SES), race/ethnicity, and sex, we must always consider their interactive effects (Collins 2015). Cumulative advantage/disadvantage and cumulative inequality theories predict that disadvantage accumulates over the life course (Ferraro et al. 2016; Schafer et al. 2011; Willson et al. 2007). Despite these extensive bodies of research, less work has focused 2
on the juncture of these fields, and, to our knowledge, no one has studied them in the context of working poverty. Read together, we can derive from these theories that a lack of familial wealth and human/social capital places people who originate in lower socioeconomic statuses, especially People of Color (POC) (Bloome 2014; Conley 1999; Neckerman and Torche 2007; Western et al. 2012), in more precarious positions when disaster strikes, whether personal (a health calamity or divorce) or during macroeconomic shock (Great Recession). We take a life-course approach in hypothesizing that early-life socioeconomic status (SES) will intersect with race/ethnicity/sex and the Great Recession to predict both higher risk of mid- to later-life working poverty and also a longer share of working life expectancy spent working poor. Methods To study the risk factors for mid- to later-life working poverty, we use the U.S. Health and Retirement Survey, a nationally-representative, population-based, biennial, longitudinal survey (n ≈ 30,000). We include those aged 50 to 70 during the years 2002-2014 to focus on the pre- and Great Recession effects and reduce problems with cohort confounding 1 (n=19,426). Working Poverty. Since the ambiguous measurement of working poverty has resulted in conflicting findings, we clearly define our terms here: 1) The sample is restricted to those who self-report working full-time or part-time (but not unemployed), and who report working at least 27 weeks of the previous year 2 ; 2) We use the household as the unit of analysis; 3) Household income includes before-tax income from earnings, unemployment, social security, social security 1 Wave 6 (2002) also marks the first wave at which RAND calculates the ratio of income to poverty threshold. 2 Taking into consideration results from Thiede et al.’s (2015) analysis, in alternative analyses, we define working poor as above, but not restricted by reports of hours or weeks worked. We also restrict to those who report averaging at least 17 hours/week. Results are consistent. 3
insurance, pensions, but not non-cash benefits or capital gains (see RAND documentation for more details); 4) RAND uses the Bureau of Labor Statistics ’ definition of the poverty threshold, adjusted for household composition; 5) For those who meet the definition of working, we count as ―poor‖ those whose household income is below 200% of the Federal Poverty Line (FPL) 3 . We take into consideration average wealth and debt over the study period (1992-2014) to account for elders who have, for example, less income, but greater housing wealth. Predictors. Social factors include quartiles of early-life SES, which is a composite variable that includes parents’ education, whether the family required financial help or had to move due to financial difficulty, whether the father contributed financially to the household, self- report of family’s SES, and childhood health (eigenvalue=2). Education is a categorical variable (less than high school, high school diploma/GED, some college, or college +). We use longest occupation as a binary ―Office/Professional‖ versus ―Manual, Service, Farms/Forestry/Fishing, Construction, Extraction.‖ We create a categorical variable for race/ethnicity and sex (male or female – non-Hispanic White, Black, and non-Black Latinx). We define pre-Recession as 2002- 2008 because although the Great Recession technically began in 2007 with the most critical crisis in the last quarter of 2008, income and financial assets listed in the HRS is for the previous year. In the first part of the analysis, age is measured as age in years as of 2002. In the second part of the analysis, age is measured as age in years. Analytic Strategy : In the first stage of the analysis, we test Hypothesis 1 that individuals who were disadvantaged in early life will have higher risk of working poverty, net of educational and occupational attainment. When studying the association between early-life factors and outcomes later in life, intermediate confounding becomes particularly problematic. Early-life SES 3 The FPL is widely accepted to be an inaccurate measure of hardship because it relies on an outdated formula (Thiede et al. 2015). We also examine those 150% above the FPL; results are consistent. 4
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