Wages & Work Supports

We believe that every New Mexican should be able to afford to go to college and that our economic development strategies should create jobs that pay living wages, guarantee family leave, protect workers’ rights, and provide access to education to improve skills and success in the workplace. (These are outcomes # 5 and # 9 on our Children’s Charter.)

We also believe that no one who works full time should live in poverty and that supports such as unemployment insurance, SNAP (formerly Food Stamps), Medicaid, and Social Security should be available to families and individuals in crisis and those who are unable to work.

For more information, browse our publications on wages and work supports.

Our Initiatives

Working Poor Families Project (WPFP) is a national initiative focused on strengthening state workforce development policies as a way of reducing poverty for working families. Read more…

Rural People, Rural Policy is a multi-year national initiative based on the premise that rural America has abundant assets and that the brightest potential for rural America emerges when a critical mass of rural people are stronger, more organized policy actors. The initiative builds networks in which diverse organizations work to achieve collective goals. Some of the key policy issues facing rural communities are transportation, predatory lending, economic development, and access to health care. NM Voices is part of the Southwest Rural Policy Network.

Other Resources

A Basic Family Budget Calculator is an important tool in determining if a family lives in poverty, because the system currently in place to do that is completely outdated.

Federal poverty guidelines, which dictate whether a family is eligible to receive assistance such as Medicaid and Food Stamps, are tied to a formula that was created in the 1960s. It was based on what the typical family spent on groceries because that was a family’s biggest expense at the time. Today, necessities like housing, childcare and health care take up a far greater share of most family incomes than groceries. Not only do the guidelines not take these changes into account, they do not take into account regional differences in the cost of living.

Because the federal guidelines are so inaccurate, families are generally considered low-income when they earn up to twice (or 200 percent) the poverty level. This makes up for some shortfalls in the guidelines, but they are still nowhere near as accurate as a Basic Family Budget.

• Click here to find out the minimum amount families need to earn in order to live at a basic, no-frills level in New Mexico’s cities and counties

Funding Sources

Our Working Poor Families Project is supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Joyce Foundation through a contract with Brandon Roberts & Associates. Rural People, Rural Policy is funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Contacts

Research Director Gerry Bradley, 505-244-9505 ext. 23
Policy Director Bill Jordan, 505-244-9505, ext. 11

Working Poor Families Project

The Working Poor Families Project operates on the assumption that because poverty is a multi-faceted issue—there is neither a single cause nor a single solution—it needs to be tackled from a variety of angles. One way to address poverty among working Americans is with so-called ‘work supports,’ which help stabilize low-wage workers while assisting their climb up the job ladder. Work supports include the federal earned income tax credit (EITC), which returns money to our lowest-paid workers, child care assistance, health care coverage, funding for adult basic education and community college attendance, and increased UI benefits.