Working but Poor? Low Pay and Poverty in Australia

Tony Eardley

The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 2000, vol. 11, issue 2, 308-338

Abstract: The decentralisation of wage bargaining in Australia has led to a widening of the earnings gap. There has been talk of a new phenomenon of ‘working poverty’, where incomes in a significant number of households fall below the poverty line even when family members are in paid employment. This paper examines the growth of working poverty in Australia from the beginning of the 1980s to the mid-1990s. The analysis suggests that the phenomenon of working poverty is real and has been growing. Low pay on an hourly basis does not in itself equal poverty, and the biggest increase in family poverty has been among employees not in low pay. Yet the proportion of low-paid workers who are also in poor families has grown considerably. In the light of these findings the paper discusses the possible impact of policy approaches such as tax credits and higher minimum wages.

Date: 2000
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/103530460001100210 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecolab:v:11:y:2000:i:2:p:308-338

DOI: 10.1177/103530460001100210

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Economic and Labour Relations Review
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().