NEW ANALYSIS SHEDS LIGHT ON EMPLOYMENT PATTERNS OF WORKERS IN LMI HOUSEHOLDS

The following information was released by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco:

Understanding employment patterns among different segments of the nation's workforce contributes to a deeper understanding of the economy, in support of the Federal Reserve's monetary policy goals. Lower-income workers, in particular, often experience barriers to participating and advancing in the labor market and achieving financial stability. In our recently released report, we analyzed 2023 American Community Survey microdata to deepen our understanding of the composition and employment patterns of workers in lower-income households, across the nation and within the Federal Reserve's Twelfth District.

Our analysis reveals that 28% of the U.S. workforce48.9 million peoplelive in a lower-income household (households with earnings below 80% of the typical household income in their community). More than 10 million of those workers live in the Twelfth District.

While most lower-income workers work full-time (65% work 35 hours a week or more), the majority of workers in a lower-income household (52%) earn less than $25,000 a year. This population tends to skew younger and have lower levels of educational attainment than average (Figure 1). And lower-income workers tend to hold jobs in occupations that pay below the typical weekly earnings of the workforce as a whole, including Office and Administrative Support, Sales, Food Preparation and Serving, Construction and Extraction, Production, and Material Moving occupations. These occupations account for roughly half of the jobs held by workers in lower-income households.