Work Poor Or Working Poor? A Comparative Perpestictive on New Zealands Jobless Households

In recent years, researchers have identified a growth in both "work-poor" and "work-rich" households in several OECD countries, including New Zealand, indicating an increasing concentration of paid employment at the household level. Changes in household structure, in the economy, and in the employment patterns of men and women have contributed to these trends, which present new challenges to social policy makers concerned about the costs and benefits of various models of welfare provision and labour market regulation. Drawing on the international literature and on a newly developed household database from the New Zealand Household Labour Force Survey, we contrast New Zealand's household employment patterns with those of the United States and the United Kingdom. In particular, we consider whether New Zealand's relatively high level of household joblessness (or "work poverty") would, in the United States policy context, be translated instead into high levels of working poverty. A high and growing proportion of New Zealand's jobless households are child-rearing households, and increasingly include two-parent households. These trends reinforce the importance of contrasting the costs of household joblessness with the benefits not of employment per se, but of employment that generates sufficient income to support the individuals and families living within these households.