Cumulative Disparities in the Dynamics of Working Poverty for Later Career U.S. Workers (2002–2012)

Abstract

Many more Americans experience working poverty than unemployed poverty, a situation that was only exacerbated by the Great Recession. The consequences of working poverty for later career workers, who should be at their highest earning ages, are particularly dire. The authors expect that later career workers are especially vulnerable in terms of the risk and duration of working poverty and that those who have accumulated disadvantages over their life courses, in terms of the intersecting dimensions of race/ethnicity, gender, early-life disadvantage, and educational attainment, will suffer disproportionately. The authors use incidence-based Markov-chain multistate models to analyze the U.S. Health and Retirement Study, which is representative of the U.S. population aged 50 years and older. The results reveal that Black women and men, Latinx, those who experienced more early-life disadvantages, and people with lower education have higher risk and longer durations in working poverty over the period from 2002 to 2012. The findings also suggest that when confronted with economic hardship (the Great Recession) later career workers who originate in lower socioeconomic statuses, especially Blacks and Latinx, are in more precarious economic positions. Important from a policy perspective, educational attainment only partially mediates the association between race/ethnicity and working poverty; disparities persist.

Disparities in the population burden of joint cognitive and physical impairment in the US, 1998-2016

“…This allows us to estimate the racial/ethnic/nativity differences, if they exist, in the years lived in joint impairment absent those which can be attributed to the considerable racial/ethnic inequalities in the distribution of educational attainment. This approach has been applied in a recent study in assessing the benefit of eliminating educational inequalities across racial groups against working poverty (Hale et al 2021).…”

Inequalities in Retirement Life Span in the United States

“…The association between education and retirement may vary over time. During the 2008–2009 Great Recession, the probability of being retired at age 65 increased for both men and women, as older workers were pushed out of the labor market ( Dudel & Myrskylä, 2017 ), but the impact of the recession varied greatly by education, affecting those with less education disproportionately ( Hale et al., 2021 ).…”

How bad could it be? Worst-case bounds on bias in multistate models due to unobserved transitions

“…Based on longitudinal data, the rates or the probabilities of transitioning between states are estimated and used to calculate quantities such as the expected lifetime spent in a specific state. Applications of multistate models include transitions between labor force states (Harris, Zhao, and Zuccheli 2021; Hayward and Lichter 1998; Lorenti et al 2020), change of family status (Bonetti, Piccaretta, and Salford 2013; Schoen, Landale, and Daniels 2007; Studer, Struffolino, and Fasang 2018), poverty dynamics (Bernstein et al 2018; Hale, Dudel, and Lorenti 2021), and migration (Klabunde et al 2017; Raymer, Willekens, and Rogers 2019; Vega and Brazil 2015).…”