Statistics
- In 2012, 10.6 million people in America were considered the ‘working poor’, by living in poverty.
- 1% of NYC residents earned nearly 45% of the city’s income in 2007. The 1%, which is about 90,000 households, had an average income of $3.7 million, equivalent to $10,000 a day. This is what the city’s poorest 1 million households earn in a year.
- The top 5 per cent of households earned $864,394, or 88 times as much as the poorest 20 per cent,
Minimum Wage Facts
- Currently, city public workers earn $11.79 an hour, but City Mayor Bill de Blasio has plans to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour, by 2018. The increase is expected to cost $238 million over the next five years, and there are some experts who worry that higher wages for public workers could cause high unemployment.
Facts
- Amy Glasmeier, a professor of economic geography at MIT, developed the Living Wage Calculator to compare the cost of living with the minimum wage across the U.S. Glasmeier says that firms can use it to estimate how to pay their employees fairly, while workers can use it to see how high the cost of living is when considering moving to take a new job, or just as information about their home area.
- Income disparity can cause changes in life expectancy. In Brooklyn's poorest neighbourhood of Brownsville, the average life expectancy is 74.1 years, whilst in Wall Street, the life expectancy is 11 years longer.
- Luxury apartments which the rich live in, such as the West Side Trump development, tower over nearby housing projects that the poor live in.
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