Work Alone Leaves 42% of U.S. Households Below Survival Budgets

Matt Helmer framed the problem as a job-quality crisis rather than a simple jobs crisis: many people are doing what the economy tells them to do — working, showing up, putting in effort — and still cannot make the monthly math work. He described workers who are “a car repair away or a medical bill away or a childcare gap away” from losing stability, and said many are already homeless or living in conditions that reveal how thin that floor has become.

The ALICE framework names the households that sit above the federal poverty line but below a basic cost-of-living threshold: Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. Stephanie Hoopes, national director of United For ALICE, identified these as workers and families struggling to afford household basics while holding jobs that keep the economy and daily life functioning. Her examples were the workers people may encounter while getting coffee, dropping a child at child care, riding public transportation, or stopping at a bank.

Hoopes’s central claim was that the official poverty measure does not describe the scale of hardship. United For ALICE’s 2023 household-income breakdown showed 13% of U.S. households in poverty and another 29% categorized as ALICE. Together, 42% of households — 55 million households — were below the ALICE threshold.

That number matters, Hoopes stressed, because the ALICE threshold is not an aspirational standard. She called the ALICE Household Survival Budget “the lowest cost budget out there,” a conservative bare-minimum estimate for housing, child care, food, transportation, health care, taxes, and other essentials. She contrasted it with tools such as the MIT self-sufficiency wage, which include additional categories and represent a more stable or aspirational benchmark. If 42% of households struggle even at the ALICE level, the affordability problem extends well beyond what the official poverty rate captures.

The Duval County slide was the clearest evidence exhibit for that claim because it put the three relevant numbers in the same frame: what a basic budget costs, what common full-time jobs pay, and how far below both the federal poverty level sits. In Duval County, Florida, in 2023, United For ALICE calculated that a family of four with two children in child care needed $87,888 for the Household Survival Budget. Two full-time workers in common occupations — one personal care aide and one stock worker or order filler — earned $68,316 combined. The federal poverty level shown for that family was $30,000.

Duval County was not presented as an outlier. United For ALICE calculates survival budgets for every county in the country, and Hoopes emphasized that the useful comparison is local: what it costs to live and work in that place versus what common jobs there pay.

The trend line adds another pressure. From 2010 to 2023, Hoopes said, the number of households in poverty remained relatively flat while ALICE households increased. The slide showed total households rising 14%, poverty households rising 3%, and ALICE households rising 24% over that period. The share below the ALICE threshold hovered around 41% to 43%, reaching 42% in 2023.

Hoopes treated that as a concern for individual households and for the broader economy. If so many households can barely cover basics, they are not participating in the economy beyond survival. The issue is therefore not only private hardship but also a constraint on growth and community stability.

Stephanie Hoopes emphasized that ALICE “lives in every community.” United For ALICE’s state range ran from 33% of households below the ALICE threshold in North Dakota to 50% in Louisiana, but the broader point was that no state, county, ZIP code, or voting district is outside the pattern. The data are available at the county, ZIP code, county subdivision, and census-designated-place levels, reflecting the organization’s emphasis on making the research usable locally.

The ALICE population also does not have one household profile. Hoopes said ALICE households include all ages, racial and ethnic groups, and household types. That has implications for solutions: “There’s no one problem and there’s no one solution,” she said. Changing the trajectory of 42% of households requires interventions across wages, costs, benefits, scheduling, transportation, child care, career pathways, and employer practice.

The Florida occupations table carried a second major part of the argument. It showed that ALICE is visible not only in household totals but inside the labor market itself. United For ALICE displayed common occupations with their total employment, the share of workers below the ALICE threshold, and median hourly wages. Some were low-wage jobs conventionally associated with economic strain. Others complicated that assumption.

The Florida table foreshadowed a theme that later employers reinforced: managers and HR teams often assume they know which employees are financially strained, but the data can disrupt those assumptions. ALICE is concentrated in lower-wage roles, but it is not confined to them.

Matt Helmer connected that point to a broader understanding of job quality. Wages are essential, but not the whole job-quality question; benefits, workplace safety, stable scheduling, and worker voice also matter. Responding to an audience question, he said his understanding from the last time he looked was that about half of full-time workers earn the MIT self-sufficiency wage. He also cited a relatively recent American Job Quality Survey finding that only about 40% of Americans believe they have a good job. The goal, in his framing, is not simply to create more jobs, but to transform jobs so workers can thrive.

Hoopes’s answer sharpened the distinction between thresholds. The ALICE Household Survival Budget is intentionally minimal. Other measures may better capture long-term stability, but ALICE is designed to identify households struggling to cover basics. That conservative framing is part of the argument: if the lower-bound measure finds hardship in more than two in five households, then job quality and affordability are not marginal concerns.

For Stephanie Hoopes, employers are unusually important because they can act quickly. They do not need to wait for legislation, committee processes, or public-policy cycles. Some employer actions directly increase income. Others reduce costs or remove logistical penalties that make low or unstable earnings harder to manage.

Her example was scheduling. A change in scheduling practice can mean a worker avoids extra child-care charges or can use public transportation reliably. In that case, the employer may not have raised wages, but it has reduced the worker’s cost burden and increased predictability.

That is the premise behind ALICE at Work. Allison Pepin, an HR consultant with more than 25 years of experience in retail, hospitality, and health care, said the program was developed after corporate partners asked United For ALICE how they could support ALICE workers inside their own workforces. The curriculum gives employers knowledge about their workers through ALICE data and strategies across benefits and compensation, financial wellness, scheduling and flexibility, professional development, and workplace resources.

The delivery model is intensive but practical: 12 hours of training, facilitated through United Way networks, with employer cohorts. Pepin said participating employers are often trying to attract talent, improve engagement, and retain workers. ALICE at Work gives them a structure for acting on those goals while addressing the real constraints their employees face.

Jessica Pilcher, who leads United for Working Families at United Way of Greater Chattanooga, described ALICE at Work as part of a broader effort to help employers rethink benefits for working caregivers and ALICE households. Caregiving intensifies barriers, whether the worker is caring for a child or an aging adult. Pilcher works with employers on policies, benefits, practices, organizational structures, communication, and leadership strategies.

In Chattanooga, demand was already present before ALICE at Work arrived. Pilcher’s team had been holding conversations with employers about how organizational practices can either support or undermine ALICE households. In roughly two years, she had trained 21 companies of varying sizes, touching just under 22,000 employees in the Southeast, with four additional cohorts planned before the end of the year and a target of just under 40 employers.

The participants were not only HR professionals. Pilcher said some of the most valuable participation came from people leaders and line leaders who could compare formal HR policy with what actually reached workers. Those exchanges exposed gaps between what organizations believed they communicated and what employees experienced.

Pilcher’s strongest claim about the curriculum was not that it provides a universal playbook. It builds empathy, then uses data and examples to move toward action. Each module returns to the human reality of “daily living and impossible choices,” and she said employers across industries in Chattanooga have left the training willing to ask whether they can do something different for their people.

The business case still matters. Pilcher said employers can be engaged through both a business perspective and a human perspective, and most conversations start with the business perspective. She said ALICE at Work trains participants that financial wellness programs can have a three-to-one return for dollars invested, and that supports such as family leave can also yield higher returns. But she argued that the human and financial cases are not separate: when employees feel seen and heard, the resulting decisions can improve business outcomes.

ALICE at Work is not designed as isolated one-on-one consulting. Participants repeatedly described the cohort model as one of its most important features. Employers learn the curriculum, but they also learn from each other’s constraints and experiments.

Allison Pepin called this an unexpected strength. Participants in cohorts began depending on one another, networking, and sharing strategies across organizations. An approach used by one employer could be adapted by another that had not considered it. In action-planning follow-ups, participants reported that they were still talking with people from their cohort after the formal training ended.

Jessica Pilcher positioned the trainer’s role as staying with employers beyond the classroom. The 12-hour curriculum introduces modules on scheduling and flexibility, financial wellness, professional development, and related areas. Participants build action plans around what they think their organization can actually do. The trainer then helps hold the organization to those commitments, provides resources, helps produce executive reports or data support when needed, and keeps walking with them until the action plan advances.

Sherra Bennett, senior program officer at the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, described Arkansas’s approach as sector-based. Cohorts have included financial institutions, the city of Little Rock, nonprofits, and other groups that can think together about how to work differently with ALICE employees. One of the most powerful findings in Arkansas, Bennett said, is that employers “genuinely want to do better” when they have tools, language, and support.

The early changes are not always sweeping. Bennett said they often begin with listening. Habitat for Humanity, for example, surveyed employees about what would materially improve their lives. Some requests were small, such as lighting. Others were more meaningful, including equitable paid time off. The organization implemented a 40-hour bank of time off rather than relying only on accrual, giving workers more immediate ability to care for a sick child or address their own health needs.

For Bennett, those kinds of changes communicate dignity. They also connect wages to the broader dimensions of job quality: autonomy, agency, voice, and whether a worker feels seen. Small organizations can often move more quickly, while larger organizations require more time and intentionality. But in both cases, narrative matters. When employers understand that ALICE workers are not an abstraction but a large part of their workforce and community, the work becomes easier to humanize.

Pilcher offered a similar distinction between smaller and larger employers. Smaller nonprofits in Chattanooga often made faster and larger changes early. A small nonprofit in her first cohort invested about $15,000 in building infrastructure so part-time workers could access the building outside normal hours, increasing scheduling flexibility. The organization realized that most of its workforce was part-time and many were ALICE workers, then changed the physical workplace to make flexible scheduling feasible.

Other Chattanooga employers added family leave, financial wellness programs, and clearer benefits communication. Pilcher singled out benefits communication because onboarding and benefits selection are often confusing, and confusion itself can prevent workers from using supports that already exist.

Her most detailed example involved a large employer running a call center. The employer initially said flexibility was impossible because phones needed coverage around the clock. After the scheduling and flexibility session, an employer representative reconsidered a worker who had called weeks earlier asking for a schedule change because she needed to pick up her child from child care. The representative had originally said no because the process did not allow it. After the training, she told Pilcher she planned to call the worker back and explore whether another department or arrangement could work.

Pilcher treated that as a meaningful outcome. Not every change begins with a new policy. Sometimes the first shift is that a manager stops interpreting a request as someone being “picky or needy” and starts seeing the family constraint underneath it.

Her advice to others working with employers was deliberately modest: do not arrive with a fixed playbook and claim to know what will work. Start with data, start with the common ground that the employer has needs and workers have needs, then “slow walk” toward practices that might fit.

Sherra Bennett argued that job quality is not separate from the issues philanthropy already funds. It sits underneath housing, child care, transportation, education outcomes, health outcomes, civic participation, and economic mobility. If working families still cannot afford basics, interventions in those other domains will continue to face the same underlying pressure.

At the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, Bennett said all strategies are underlaid by the ALICE framework. The foundation uses it to understand the roughly half of Arkansans who are ALICE, which she described as one in every 2.3 households across the state. The framework helped the foundation connect its work to what communities were already saying: conventional poverty statistics did not tell the whole story of who was thriving and who was struggling.

Bennett positioned philanthropy as a convener and risk-taker. It can invest in organizations, bring employers together, spread a narrative, and create the outside infrastructure needed to pilot approaches. The value is not always writing the biggest check; sometimes it is being willing to be bold or brave enough to invest in something that connects across multiple systems.

In Arkansas, Bennett said, the ALICE framework has moved upstream. Legislators now hold an ALICE day at the hill, and there is an ALICE Youth Leadership Coalition. For Bennett, that is evidence that a data and narrative framework can change the conversation beyond any one employer program.

Cary Dawson, director of strategic partnerships for United For ALICE at Work, later reinforced the community-infrastructure point. ALICE at Work was operating in 10 states at the time of the discussion and expected to be in 13 by the end of the month. Dawson said the United Way network gives the program local relationships with corporate, government, and nonprofit stakeholders, as well as communities already engaged with ALICE data.

Dawson emphasized that the sixth module of ALICE at Work focuses on support and resources, creating an opportunity to localize the curriculum. Employers are not only asked to absorb a framework; they are connected to what their community can provide and to what the broader ALICE movement is already doing.

She also clarified the cohort design. ALICE at Work cohorts typically include five companies and 20 participants, a size she described as appropriate for adult learning, reflection, retention, and impact. About 65% of participants come from HR, and more than half are director level or above. But Dawson said the program also intentionally brings nonprofits and ALICE voices to the table.

That matters because ALICE is not only the subject of the work; ALICE workers are often in the room. Dawson said Module One, “Meet ALICE,” includes first-person scenarios about impossible choices. In cohort feedback, participants often say some version of “that was me” — early in their career, before they became a senior HR leader or executive, they lived with the same instability. The program gives them tools and language for an experience they may already understand personally but had not connected to organizational decision-making.

Lynn Sohn, engagement and retention specialist at UR Medicine Thompson Health, already spends much of her job talking with employees across their careers. She hears about child care, transportation, rising costs, family responsibilities, and caregiving. ALICE at Work did not introduce those issues; it “takes the guesswork out of it” by quantifying them.

Thompson Health, the largest employer in Ontario County in New York’s Finger Lakes region, participated in two ALICE at Work cohorts. Its local United Way partner presented data to the executive leadership team, and the organization built an evolving action plan around benefits and compensation, scheduling, flexibility, professional development, and related supports. Sohn said the data provided justification for allocating resources and a framework for moving beyond the status quo.

The data also challenged assumptions. In health care, Sohn said, leaders might assume ALICE workers are concentrated in entry-level jobs. But the data showed that registered nurses and other positions not usually considered entry-level could also fall into ALICE status. That widened the organization’s understanding of who needed support.

Elizabeth McDowell, HR generalist at Hamilton County Schools, described a similar shift from individual assumptions to community data. The district has about 6,000 employees across roughly 81 schools, with another school expected to bring the count to 82, and supports 45,000 students across the county. Because it is a large public entity, McDowell said the district looked not only at employee data but also at community data.

What stood out was the difference between initial access and sustainability. McDowell said there are resources that can help someone get into an apartment, get a car, or remove an initial barrier. But fewer supports address what happens when the car needs repairs, the roof leaks, or student loans come due. Those are the moments when a household’s progress can stall or reverse.

Hamilton County Schools responded by creating 25 financial well-being classes focused on sustainability: budgeting, managing student loans, becoming renter-ready in a difficult rental market, budgeting for home repairs, and other practical topics. The classes are offered at schools and public community centers. Nonprofits can invite workers whose employers may not have enough participants to host their own class. McDowell described this as aligned with the district’s role as an education organization: supporting employees while also strengthening the community.

Both employer examples showed ALICE at Work functioning less as a diagnosis of low wages alone and more as a way to identify where workplace systems collide with household fragility. For Thompson Health, that led to an executive-level action plan. For Hamilton County Schools, it led to financial education, community partnerships, and a broader view of public-employer responsibility.

Lynn Sohn said Thompson Health’s post-cohort changes included earned wage access, an associate compassion fund, resource navigation, and career-path work. The earned wage access program — daily pay — came partly through learning from another cohort organization. Thompson looked for a partner that would not charge fees or costs to employees.

The compassion fund, built with United Way, allows associates to seek help during sudden emergencies or financial hardship. Thompson also has “success coaches,” which Sohn described as resource navigators who assist employees with needs outside a traditional employee assistance program: child care, back rent, transportation, and similar issues. Another cohort organization has begun exploring how to adapt that model.

Career pathways are the next area of work. Sohn said Thompson is looking at internal education, possible career paths, funding for additional education, and flexible programs for people with families who cannot pursue traditional education routes. The action plan remains active: the organization returns to it, asks what it has completed, and identifies what comes next. The continuing relationship with other cohort employers helps sustain pressure and ideas.

Elizabeth McDowell said Hamilton County Schools is pursuing both external partnerships and internal advancement. The district has begun discussions with county government about joining forces to seek better benefits through shared RFP or RFQ processes. The goal is to use combined buying power to secure benefits that are financially valuable but available at a lower price point for employees.

Internally, the district has expanded its “grow your own” program. Employees can work their way into teaching through an educator preparedness pathway, while clerical and other staff have internal education processes that can increase their roles, income potential, and education over time. McDowell described the approach as twofold: build outside partnerships and grow from within.

She also offered an early example of ripple effects on students. While teaching resume-building to juniors and seniors, she spoke with a young woman who wanted to become a teacher. The student had watched an educational assistant move through the grow-your-own pathway and become a teacher. The student noticed that the former assistant had moved from an apartment to buying a house and connected that career path to her own aspirations: she wanted to buy a house and help children. McDowell said it was too early for full student-outcome analysis, but that kind of example showed the visible effect of advancement pathways inside schools.

The benefits cliff surfaced as a practical constraint. Matt Helmer asked whether rising wages can cause workers to lose public benefits, creating a disincentive or hardship during advancement. Sohn said she had not heard that issue raised at Thompson but could see how it would matter. McDowell said Hamilton County Schools does see it: as wages increase, transitioning from systemic supports to paying for family benefits can be hard, especially when medical insurance can cost several hundred dollars a month.

The district’s response includes a zero-deductible health plan, so employees paying premiums are not also paying copays, and an employee clinic and pharmacy. Clinic visits are free. Pharmaceuticals are free or very low cost. Employees who do not participate in the district medical plan can still use the clinics.

Cary Dawson identified the main obstacle as time. ALICE at Work asks busy professionals for 12 hours, which is a real investment. The program has tried to respond with scheduling practices that are favorable, flexible, and adaptable.

The second obstacle is capacity around data sharing. Dawson said employers rarely resist the idea of data sharing itself, particularly because United For ALICE is a national data center. The requested information is basic benefits census data that organizations may already collect. But remembering, tabulating, and uploading it can still be a capacity challenge. Dawson emphasized that employers can benefit from the program even if they do not participate in the data-reporting component.

Elizabeth McDowell described a different kind of productive resistance inside a cohort. In one discussion, the city had both an HR leader and a worker involved in tree maintenance or recreation services in the room. When the HR leader described how something worked, the frontline participant responded, “That’s not how that works.” McDowell saw that moment as valuable rather than disruptive. The two met after class to discuss why the process did not work, how it could work better, and how the information could be communicated to others in the frontline role.

Labor unions were raised by an audience question. Lynn Sohn said Thompson Health itself does not have a union, though some affiliates do. McDowell said Hamilton County Schools does not have unions but does have an educators association and collaborative agreements; those discussions include benefits, administration, communication, and access across roles from teachers to school nutrition workers. Dawson said some ALICE at Work employer partners have been affiliated with labor unions, but the program has not found that to affect participation or value. She framed ALICE at Work as professional development for employer decision-making around talent and workforce practices. She also noted that union versus non-union status could become an additional data lens.

For Matt Helmer, the importance of the work lay partly in mindset change. Awareness is a first step, he said, and shifting mindset is itself an outcome because it opens the door to later changes. Pilcher’s call-center story illustrated that point: before policy changes, a manager may need to reinterpret a worker’s request as a stability issue rather than an inconvenience.

The model described by the participants is incremental, relational, and data-informed. It begins with local cost and workforce data, asks employers to see ALICE inside their own organizations, uses cohorts to build shared practice, and turns action planning into specific changes. Those changes can be wage-related, but they can also involve scheduling, leave, benefits design, resource navigation, emergency assistance, communication, professional development, or public-private purchasing.

The underlying claim is narrower and more practical than a promise to solve household hardship by employer action alone. ALICE at Work treats employers as one of the actors able to make immediate changes while larger policy and economic debates continue. Hoopes put the point simply: employers can increase income, but they can also reduce costs and friction. In a household living at the edge of the survival budget, either can matter.