Poverty Despite Work in Connecticut, 2005

Employment is widely recognized as a necessary condition to emerge from poverty. Yet for too many Connecticut families, employment may not be sufficient to escape poverty. This brief finds that the majority of Connecticut’s poor families have a working parent, but nonetheless have a family income under the federal poverty level. Among poor Connecticut families with a parent who was able to work, over three quarters (76%) had a parent in the workforce, and almost half (21,000 families) had a parent who worked more than 26 weeks over the course of the year.