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Recession hammers California's low-wage workers
Many of California's lowest-paid workers appear to have tumbled into the ranks of the poor last year, as the recession hammered people already straining to live in a high-cost state, U.S. census data released today indicates.
The nation's most populous state had a bigger increase in the number of people living below the poverty line than any other state during the first year of the recession. About 160,000 more Californians fell below the poverty line in 2008 than during the three years preceding the start of the recession. But nine states showed a bigger jump in their overall poverty rates.
California's poverty rate bumped up to 13.3 percent in 2008, from 13 percent in the three years preceding the recession. Most experts expect those numbers to get significantly worse when the books are closed on 2009.
"A lot of the downturn occurred later in 2008. The big dramatic increase in unemployment occurred later," said Hans Johnson, a demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California. "So this is only a partial picture of what we expect to see in 2010 when the 2009 data is released."
