Less Income for More Hours of Work: Barriers to Work for Social Assistance Recipients in B.C

Gillian Petit, Craig Scott, Blake Gallacher, Jennifer Zwicker and Lindsay Tedds
Additional contact information
Craig Scott: University of Calgary
Blake Gallacher: University of Calgary
Jennifer Zwicker: University of Calgary

SPP Briefing Papers, 2020, vol. 13, issue 16

Abstract: Individuals accept additional paid work, in terms of salary increase or more hours, with the expectation they will be financially better off than before. Unfortunately, for recipients of Income Assistance in the province of British Columbia, additional hours of employment or an increase in wages, such as an increase in minimum wage, in some circumstances may actually take money out of their pocket. This is due to the design of Income Assistance and its unintended interactions with other income and social support programs and the tax system. In this paper, we illustrate cases where B.C. residents receiving Disability Assistance or Temporary Assistance (the two main programs that comprise Income Assistance in B.C.) have less after-tax income after working additional hours of employment.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.policyschool.ca/wp-content/uploads/202 ... Work-Petit-et-al.pdf (application/pdf)

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:clh:briefi:v:13:y:2020:i:16

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in SPP Briefing Papers from The School of Public Policy, University of Calgary Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bev Dahlby ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).