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Book review: Handbook on In-Work Poverty

Document Cited authorities 2 Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorLaura Schmitt
Published date01 December 2019
Date01 December 2019
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/1388262719890703
Subject MatterBook reviews
EJS890705 384..402 398
European Journal of Social Security 21(4)
Lohmann, Henning and Marx, Ive (eds.), 2018, Handbook on In-Work Poverty, Cheltenham: Edward
Elgar, 508 pages, ISBN: 978-1-78471-562-5 (hardback).
Reviewed by: Laura Schmitt, University of Hamburg, Germany
DOI: 10.1177/1388262719890703
In the past, poverty and social exclusion were often associated with long-term unemployment.
More recently, however, the issue of in-work poverty (IWP) has developed into a subject of
academic and political debate, acknowledging that a substantial number of workers are either poor
or at risk of poverty. Based on the most recent ILO estimates, made in 2018, eight per cent of all
employed persons worldwide were living in households with a per capita income of under US$ 1.90
per day at purchasing power parity, i.e. under the international poverty line. Another 13 per cent were
moderately poor, meaning they had to survive on US$ 3.10 or less (ILO, 2019). In 2017, for the
EU-28, the IWP rate was 9.4 per cent, meaning nearly 20.5 million workers lived in households with
an equivalised disposable income of 60 per cent or less of the national median (ESPN, 2019).
As a hybrid concept, IWP research combines the individual labour market perspective of
traditional labour market research with a household and family perspective advanced by general
poverty research. This takes account of the fact that the number of dependents in a household on
the one hand, and other sources of income on the other, may significantly influence the poverty
situation (see chapters 3, 9 and 10 for explorations of these issues). As a result, focusing on low
wage employment is not conducive to reaching the goal of reducing poverty among workers and
their families. Instead, as the analyses in the reviewed volume clearly demonstrate, IWP is driven
by a combination of low pay, low work intensity at household level and household structure.
Therefore, to develop promising policy proposals one needs to look at a number of interrelated
issues that go beyond low pay, including household work intensity, family...

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