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Life chances and parents’ employment
Janet Taylor
Brotherhood of St Laurence
Contact Email: jtaylor
bsl.org.au
Changing employment patterns in Australia and overseas have led to an increasing polarisation between families who are ‘work rich’ and ‘work poor’, those with high household incomes from work and those with little or no income from work (Burbidge & Sheehan 2001).
The Brotherhood of St Laurence’s longitudinal study, the Life Chances Study, provides data to explore what has happened to the employment and incomes of a diverse group of Australian families with young children between 1990 and 2002. The study commenced in 1990 with families with a child born in that year. By 2002 when the children were turning 12, 60 per cent of the low-income families in the study had no parent in paid employment.
The paper draws on both the quantitative and qualitative data of the study to examine the patterns of employment and income over 12 years of the families who were on low-incomes at the commencement of the study and the characteristics and experiences of individual families. The paper identifies barriers to employment and explores to what extent employment has provided a path out of poverty. Implications for policy are outlined.
Paper
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Paper101.pdf
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Copyright © 2003 Social Policy Research Centre.
