Low Pay and Family Poverty.

Presents an edited version of a paper presented to the Sixth Australian Institute of Family Studies Conference "Changing Families, Challenging Futures," held in Melbourne, Victoria on 25-29, November 1998, concerning low pay and family poverty in Australia. To be in paid work but poor used to be a contradiction in terms in Australia's "wage earners" welfare state. In the early 1970s, the Commission of Enquiry into Poverty estimated that less than 2 per cent of families with an adult in full-time employment could be described as poor. In the 1990s, however, having employment is no longer a guarantee of staying out of poverty. The ACTU's Living Wage Case attempted to put working poverty on the public agenda by expressly linking the question of low pay with that of household deprivation. Yet many low-paid workers live in better-off households, and the links between individual and family income status are complex. A study in progress at the Social Policy Research Centre suggests that a trend towards working poverty has accelerated in the 1990s, and this article draws on the research to trace the links between individual low pay and family poverty.