New Ideas and Strategies for Low-Wage Work

Nearly one-third of all jobs pay $10 an hour or less, often providing no employment benefits and little flexibility. Even though the U.S. is among the wealthiest nations in the world, workers in these jobs are paid less than workers who hold similar jobs elsewhere.

The last decade has seen some progress on advancing a number of well-known policies to improve job quality by boosting the minimum wage and expanding publicly subsidized employment benefits, like child care and wage subsidies such as the Earned Income Tax Credit. Similar progress has been made to address education and advancement strategies to prepare workers for skilled jobs.

However, when one worker advances out of a low-wage job and another worker takes it, the job does not change. Across the nation, state and local stakeholders are experimenting with a host of new initiatives to improve low-wage jobs. These innovative ideas are far less well known and aren’t commonly incorporated into an anti-poverty agenda.

We aim to identify and develop a more complete understanding of a new and exciting set of policies to improve the jobs in this large and growing segment of our labor market. To achieve this goal, we are doing the following: