Poverty and the Oregon Workforce

Oregon’s poverty rate edged down in 2017 after a drop of more than 2 percentage points in 2016. In 2017, the share of the population below poverty level was 13.2 percent. Poverty rates in Oregon have tracked pretty smoothly with the national trend over the past decade.

Narrowing the population to just the civilian labor force – which is composed of people over the age of 16 and either employed or actively looking for work – the poverty rate is lower. Among Oregonians in the labor force, the poverty rate was 8.1 percent in 2017. When Oregon’s overall poverty rate peaked at 17.5 percent in 2011, the poverty rate among the civilian labor force was 12.4 percent. In 2017, the lowest rate of poverty among the labor force was in New Hampshire, at 4.3 percent, while the highest rate was in Louisiana, at 11.0 percent of the civilian labor force.

Digging into more details of Oregon’s labor force, poverty is lower among the employed portion of the labor force, at 6.8 percent. Poverty is much higher among the unemployed – Oregon’s unemployed had a poverty rate of 32.3 percent. For those Oregon workers who had worked a full-time, year-round schedule in the prior 12 months, the poverty rate plummeted to just 2.5 percent. Those who worked part-time or part of the year in the prior 12 months had a poverty rate of 16.8 percent.

To learn more about poverty in Oregon, read the full article written by Employment Economist Jessica Nelson.