Women and the Minimum Wage
Without an increase the minimum wage will continue to fall, further depleting the purchasing power of the more than five million workers who earn at or below $4.25 per hour.
Without an increase the minimum wage will continue to fall, further depleting the purchasing power of the more than five million workers who earn at or below $4.25 per hour.
In the latest campaign to move recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) off the welfare rolls through time-limiting benefits and ending entitlements, little attention has been paid to what will work to increase the likelihood that AFDC recipients can find work and earn wages above the barest minimum.
Have the employment opportunities of women and minorities been negatively impacted as a result of corporate and industrial restructuring?
An IWPR paper presented at the 1995 Annual Meetings of the American Economics Association of the Allied Social Science Associations. Argues for the need to change the traditional social welfare system to allow for demographic changes, family diversity, and women’s need for income replacement across the life cycle.
By 1989, twenty states had implemented programs to raise the wages of workers in female-dominated jobs in their state civil services.
By 1989, twenty states had implemented programs to raise the wages of workers in female-dominated job classes in their state civil services.
Supporters of micro-enterprise argue that self-employment is a strategy that can improve the economic well being of low-income families and promote economic development in poverty-stricken urban communities.
Since its beginnings, there has been heated public debate about whether AFDC should be a relatively ungenerous stop-gap program, or an anti-poverty program specifically designed to meet the needs of families headed by single women.
In contrast to stereotypes of pathological dependency on public assistance, single mothers participating in the AFDC program actually “package” income from several different sources, including paid employment, means- and non-means tested welfare benefits, and income from other family members, to provide for themselves and their children. These patterns are described in a new Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) study, “Welfare that Works,” based on a nationally-representative sample of single welfare mothers generated from the US Bureau of the Census’ Survey of Income and Program Participation.