• The caregiver who tends for an elderly neighbor or the toddler next door.
• The gardener who works evenings as a dishwasher.
• The baggage handler at the airport whose wife cleans houses while their baby stays with grandparents.

They’re not just working poor, they’re working hard – but they’re not making ends meet.

Government Poverty Levels.  The U.S. Federal Government defines a family of four as living in poverty if it earns less than $21,200. In California living in poverty is commonly viewed as making less than $37,602, nearly twice the federal amount. Working full time at the state’s minimum hourly wage of $8.00 per hour, a worker would earn only $16,640 – far below the federal and state poverty levels.

Bay Area Poverty.  In the Bay Area, the picture is even bleaker given that the cost of living is substantially higher than the national average. For this reason, a California Self-Sufficiency Standard was developed to more accurately measure the actual costs incurred by individuals and families to meet their basic needs.

Using this self-sufficiency standard, an East Bay family in 2003, with two working parents and two school age children, had to earn $45,757 a year to meet the family’s basic needs. Based on this standard, 25 percent of the residents of Alameda county and 21 percent of the residents of Contra Costa county had incomes too low to pay for housing, food, health care, transportation, child care, taxes and miscellaneous expenses.

Additional Hardships.   Most minimum wage jobs do not offer medical benefits, sick days, vacation, or retirement plans. A family breadwinner cannot afford to miss a day of work due to illness or family emergency because that day’s wages pay for the next day’s food. Nearly 78 percent of low-wage workers in service jobs do not have health insurance. And most of these minimum wage jobs are not full time, so it takes two or more jobs to pay for the basics.

Issues Facing the Working Poor.  In summary, the working poor face a multitude of challenges:

• Inadequate minimum wage.
• Ineligibility for assistance programs.
• High cost of living in the East Bay with expensive transportation, food, housing, and health care.
• Lack of affordable housing and child care
• Reductions in public funding for housing assistance, social support services, education, emergency shelters, employment programs.
• Increasing number of other low income families competing for jobs and limited services.

These families seem to have no way out, no way up, and very little hope. It is for these people that the 1200 Foundation was established.
                           
1 Northern California Council for the Community (NCCC), The Self-Sufficiency Standard for California 2003, prepared for
Californians for Family Economic Self-Sufficiency, a project of the National Economic Development and Law Center.
2 United Way of the Bay Area, The Bottom Line: Setting the Real Standard for Bay Area Working Families, September 2004
3 “Waging a Living,” documentary by Public Policy Productions (http://www.pppdocs.com/wal.html).

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