ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to apply the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) definition of the working poor to the French case and presents the obtained results with US statistics on the working poor. It identifies the effects of low earnings, part-time work, and unemployment on poverty and compare them to US findings, when applying B. W. Klein and A. L. Rones' decomposition of poverty risks of employed persons. In order to define the concept of "working poor," one first has to define poverty and second to identify the working people among the poor. The poor populations in France and in the United States are mainly composed of persons out of the labor force: 64.3 percent in France and 79 percent in the US, in 1997. In France, three factors affect the poverty risk with a decreasing intensity: unemployment, low wage, and part-time work. In the United States, low earnings are the major contributor to poverty.
