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The working poor are working people whose incomes fall below a given poverty line due to low-income jobs and low familial household income. These are people who spend at least 27 weeks in a year working or looking for employment, but remain under the poverty threshold.
The Gilbert model was developed by Dennis Gilbert as a means of a more effective way of classifying people in a given society into social classes.It posits the existence of six distinct classes: a capitalist class, an upper middle class, a lower middle class, a working class, a working-poor class, and an underclass.
The working class is sometimes separated into those who are employed but lacking financial security (the "working poor") and an underclass—those who are long-term unemployed and/or homeless, especially those receiving welfare from the state. The latter is today considered analogous to the Marxist term "lumpenproletariat".
Gunnar Myrdal is generally credited as the first proponent of the term underclass. Writing in the early 1960s on economic inequality in the U.S., Myrdal's underclass refers to a "class of unemployed, unemployables, and underemployed, who are more and more hopelessly set apart from the nation at large, and do not share in its life, its ambitions, and its achievements". [3]
In sociology and anthropology, the concept created a backlash, pushing scholars to look to structures rather than "blaming-the-victim" (Bourgois 2001). [ 10 ] Since the late 1990s, the culture of poverty has witnessed a resurgence in social sciences, but most scholars now reject the notion of a monolithic and unchanging culture of poverty.
The Working Poor: Invisible in America, Knopf (2004), hardcover, 322 pages, ISBN 0-375-40890-8; Zweig, Michael, Working Class Majority: America's Best Kept Secret, Cornell University Press (2001), trade paperback, 198 pages, ISBN 0-8014-8727-7 "America's Forgotten Majority" Joel Rogers and Ruy Teixeira, The Atlantic June, 2000
The working class is a subset of employees who are compensated with wage or salary-based contracts, whose exact membership varies from definition to definition. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Members of the working class rely primarily upon earnings from wage labour .
The Working Poor: Invisible in America is a 2004 book written by Pulitzer Prize-winner David K. Shipler. From personal interviews and research, Shipler presents in this book anecdotes and life stories of individuals considered the working poor. [ 1 ]