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America's more than three million direct care workers (DCWs) -- a category that includes nursing assistants, home health aides, and personal and home care aides -- play a crucial role in maintaining the health and economic security of elderly retirees and people with disabilities. Yet, they are among the most poorly compensated and economically insecure workers in the United States.Only about one in every four direct care workers have employer-provided retirement benefits. When these workers themselves retire or become disabled, many of them will rely almost exclusively on modest Social Security benefits to keep a roof over their heads and meet other basic living expenses.Some recent proposals to cut Social Security would put the retirement security of direct care workers -- and millions of other workers in poorly compensated jobs -- at risk. Instead of cutting Social Security benefits, the federal government should strengthen Social Security in ways that increase retirement security, particularly for retirees who have worked in poorly compensated jobs and typically have little or no retirement savings outside of Social Security.This brief provides direct care workers and their allies with information they can use to become engaged in efforts to maintain and strengthen Social Security. After providing background on how Social Security works and why today's direct care workers can count on it being there for them when they retire, it details some troubling recent proposals that would cut Social Security benefits. The final section way to improve Social Security and increase the retirement security of direct care workers.

Millions of American workers are poorly compensated for the work they do. This is not because they do not work hard or deserve adequate compensation. Rather, it is due to a political failure to ensure that increases in economic growth and productivity over the last several decades have been fairly distributed. One consequence of this failure is that many working-class Americans do not enjoy the living standards they deserve either during their working years or when they retire. Without the earned benefits provided by Social Security, along with Medicare and related health insurance benefits for the elderly, these workers would see their already modest living standards in old age fall even further below typical ones.The federal government should strengthen Social Security in ways that increase the retirement security of middle and working-class Americans. Particular attention should be paid to improving the living standards in retirement of workers in poorly compensated jobs, who typically have little or no retirement savings outside of Social Security. Some recent proposals to cut Social Security would put the retirement security of workers in poorly compensated jobs at further risk. While it would be wise to shore up the long-term finances of Social Security, this can be done without cutting benefits for working and middle-class retirees. Finally, it is important to remember that Social Security by itself cannot be the sole vehicle for addressing an economy that is out of balance. We need to do much more improve job quality in the United States by ensuring that poorly compensated workers get a better deal.This report examines the essential role that Social Security plays in bolstering the retirement security of poorly compensated workers.

This report details how the dominant framework for understanding and measuring poverty in the United States has become a conservative one. The current U.S. approach to measuring poverty views poverty only in terms of having an extremely low level of annual income, and utilizes poverty thresholds that are adjusted only for inflation rather than for changes in overall living standards. As a result, the official poverty measure has effectively defined deprivation down over the last four decades, moving it further and further away from mainstream living standards over time, as well as from majority public opinion of the minimum amount needed to "get along" at a basic level. A new Supplemental Income Poverty Measure (SIPM) proposed by the Obama administration makes some important improvements to the current poverty measure. However, the SIPM remains a conservative approach that appears likely to lock in the poverty line at an extremely low level. This report proposes a new framework for measuring poverty and basic economic security in the United States. Instead of being limited to the "extremely-low-income-only" approach the current poverty line and administration's proposed Supplemental Income Poverty Measure (SIPM) represent, this framework should utilize measures of low income and other forms of economic hardship related to low income.

This report provides a detailed look at the tax provisions in the ARRA, noting which current laws are affected and the costs of each.

Leading health care reform proposals all require individuals to obtain health care coverage, but differ in how they would require employers to share in the costs of coverage for their employees. This report reviews the employer responsibility requirements in the leading proposals -- often referred to as "play-or-pay" provisions -- and makes recommendations on how to best structure such a requirement to ensure that relatively low paid workers are not negatively impacted by them.

Two of the three leading health care reform proposals being considered by Congress -- the House "Tri-Committee" health care reform legislation and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee's reform legislation -- include sensibly designed "play-or-pay" provisions that require employers to pay an assessment if they do not offer insurance to some or all of their employees. The third leading health care reform proposal -- the bill proposed by Sen. Max Baucus and currently under consideration by the Senate Finance Committee -- also includes a play-or-pay requirement, but it is poorly designed and would be unfair to employers, harmful to employees, and impose wasteful expenses on taxpayers.

Leaders in both the House and the Senate have committed to "shared responsibility" as a basic principle of health care reform, meaning that the costs of health care coverage are shared by individuals, businesses, and the public sector. However, as this issue brief documents, the Senate version of the bill creates a free rider problem that would make it easy for many large and profitable employers, particularly the ones paying poor wages, to shirk their responsibilities.

The current U.S. poverty measure is outdated and has failed to keep up with public consensus on the minimum amount of income needed to "get along" in the United States in the 21st Century. One potential approach to revising the measure, based on recommendations made by a National Academy of Sciences panel in 1995, improves in some ways on the current measure, but has serious limitations of its own that require further research before it is adopted. Moreover, the NAS approach results in a poverty measure that would remain far below the public's get-along level. To address these problems, the incoming Administration should adopt a "tiered" poverty and economic inclusion measure that is modeled on the child poverty measure adopted in 2003 by the United Kingdom.

This essay examines the impact of unionization on the pay and benefits in fifteen important low‐wage occupations. Even after controlling for important differences between union and nonunion workers—including such factors as age and education level—unionization substantially improves the pay and benefits offered in what are otherwise low‐paying occupations.On average, in the low‐wage occupations analyzed here, unionization raised workers' wages by just over 16 percent—about $1.75 per hour—compared to those of nonunion workers. Unionization also raises the likelihood that a worker has employer‐provided health insurance or an employer‐sponsored retirement plan by 25 percentage points. These union wage and benefit effects are particularly impressive given the widespread belief that many of the jobs analyzed here are inherently incapable of providing decent pay and benefits.