Working Poor in the Golden State: A Multi-measure Comparison Using the 2000 and 1990 Public Use Microdata Samples

By Manuel Pastor Jr. and Justin Scoggins

http://cjtc.ucsc.edu/docs/r_golden_state.pdf

In response to rising in low-wage employment and increasing debate over the issue of "working poverty", this report closely examines the impact that a variety of ways of defining working poverty have on our perception of the size and composition of the working poor in California. By taking advantage of the unusually detailed information that is available in the 1990 and 2000 Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS), the demographic, geographic, and labor market dimensions of working poverty are compared and contrasted across 18 different definitions, while at the same time providing estimates of the extent, nature, and trajectory of the problem.

The result is an uncovering of biases that exist under some of the definitions that have been used to measure working poverty and a recommended "best" definition for the state that is both politically feasible and computationally practical, along with a detailing the characterization of working poverty in California and its regions in 2000 and the rise in working poverty that took place over the 1990s.