In the Classroom

Poverty and the Working Poor

By Lory Hough

The students in Lecturer Sylvia Epps’ class, Low-Income Children and Families: A Developmental Perspective, are talking about Mary Ann Moore, a single mother and former welfare recipient who, despite working 56 hours a week as a cook at a homeless shelter in Chicago, was still having trouble making it. Moore had been featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in a story about women who had left welfare for work.

In a class where there are as many questions as there are answers, Epps pushes her students to look closely at the article. “Would you consider her a success story?” she asks. “Should she be the poster child for ending poverty as we know it?” One student jumps in. “She’s an exception,” she says. “Not everyone has childcare or other kids who can take care of the younger ones.”

But despite this, Epps points out, Moore still struggled. To keep her job, she and her kids had to get up at 3:30 every morning. When she left welfare, her rent increased and she had to cover insurance and daycare herself. She was, as reporter Jason DeParle noted in the article, just “one sick child away from destitution.”

Another question from Epps: “At the end of the day, then, why would she trade welfare for work?”

Students talk about contributing to society and being a role model for her children. One student doesn’t know why she would make the trade. Having to put in those kinds of hours, she says, especially for a single parent, is a tradeoff.

“The streets are raising your kids,” she says. “It’s nice that we want people on welfare to get jobs, but the system isn’t rewarding them for working.”

Epps says if you work full time, you should not be poor, but points out that one in four American workers are poor. “We have to make work pay,” she says, “and make it pay with 40 hours.”

Earlier in the class, Epps talked about how the poverty line was created in the early 1960s by a woman named Molly Orshansky, a research analyst with the Social Security Administration, based, basically, on the cost of food times three.

“There are a lot of questions about this measure,” which has not changed much over the years, Epps tells the class. She shares a Powerpoint slide that lists some of the problems with the measure, such as not adjusting for family size or the high cost of living in some cities.

“It also doesn’t distinguish between the needs of workers and nonworkers,” she says. “In what way?”

Students throw out possible reasons: childcare costs and transportation. “What else?” she says, pushing them to dig deeper. “Any ideas?”

“Transportation?” a student says. “The added cost of uniforms,” says another.

“Yes.” Epps says. “This measure underestimates what poverty is for workers.”

Another student talks about housing, especially for lowwage workers in expensive cities like Boston and Los Angeles who are not living in Section 8 apartments. How, she wonders, are you supposed to make it with a low-paying hourly job? “If you pay $800 a month in rent, that’s $9,600 a year,” she says. “I don’t get it!”

Epps shakes her head back and forth. “Neither do I,” she says. “Neither do I.”

About the Article

A version of this article originally appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Respond to this story with an e-mail to the editor.

illustration by Tim Walker