At Work..., and Poor? A Look at the Czech Working Poor Population in the Living Conditions Survey (EU-SILC)

Abstract

The main aim of the article is to analyse the working poor employees and their household's social situation in the national income and living conditions survey (EU-SILC). The analysis starts with the definition of the two main groups of employees according to the number of months spent in the full-time employment - those working whole year and those employed for 6 to 11 months. Poverty in earned income concept is used to evaluate poverty at individual level, confronting employee's income with single person household poverty line benchmark. The study then moves to the household level poverty measure based on household's disposable equivalised income. When shifting from the individual income to the household's one the economies of scale represented by an implicit or explicit equivalence scale used in the construction of the household poverty measure play a crucial role. Therefore, attention is paid to the comparison of poverty level based on equivalised disposable income using equivalence scales and per-capita income. At the end, material deprivation of different subgroups of employees according to their poverty status is examined.

Keywords

• Working poor
• poverty in earned income
• at-risk-of-poverty rate
• material deprivation