What is The Working Poor?

Are you someone that works five days a week for a modest wage and spends more time confined within office walls than with your own family or friends? Now think about your living circumstances and ask yourself, in addition to this, are you an individual who’s basic living expenses greatly outweighs your earnings (leaving you with no money or in debt)? If this sounds like you, there’s a good chance you are one of the lucky people who can call themselves the working poor. This term is used to describe people that are constantly employed full-time, but although they work at the same or even higher pace of that as a successful management level worker, they are in poverty due to their low income and high level of expenses (living paycheck to paycheck or worse). According to Wikipedia, in the United States, the official definition of working poor is defined as individuals who spent at least 27 weeks in the labor force (working or looking for work), but whose incomes fell below the official poverty level. Many individuals said to be classified as “working poor” have negative net worth and lack the ability to escape personal or economic problems. The truth is that many people who fall into this category actually are well below the poverty level and are many times just poor (and vice versa).

The real problem with this increasingly growing class of people worldwide is that not only is it becoming common, but it is becoming accepted. In fact there is a good possibility that you, the reader, considers yourself to be or have been in this same category. What most people don’t realize is that the class of ‘working poor’ individuals is the major group of people actually making the world turn around (usually in a good way). These souls are the ones not only working to keep food on everyones table, but they are the ones who are the most socially, politically, and environmentally aware. I don’t mean aware as in publicly concerned, extreme, or agenda driven, I mean that these people are forced to remain the “common man” most of their lives, which gives them no choice but to deeply analyze the tough realities surrounding them and the problems they are faced with. Unlike many privileged people who have a false reality, and on the other side, those who flat-out choose not to work and hold the attitude that they are entitled to success.

What category are you in? And does it matter? And furthermore, what will you do to help others get out of this rut?