The Issue:
Financial Stability

Thousands of people in Chicagoland are struggling like never before to make ends meet financially. A full one-quarter of our workforce now earns less than $9.04 an hour, which translates into a full-time salary of $18,800 a year (the income that marks the federal poverty line for a family of four). Why are so many people struggling financially?

Illinois has lost more than 150,000 manufacturing jobs (mostly in our region), and those jobs have been replaced with jobs paying at least 20% less. And it appears that this troubling trend is continuing. The jobs where the state forecasts the most growth—cashiers, retail, warehouse work and janitorial jobs—have starting pays around minimum wage.

A full one-quarter of our workforce now earns less than $9.04 an hour and working families are spending 20% of their household budgets on transportation.

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Many workers lack the education to obtain even those low-paying service jobs. With so many applicants from which to choose, employers are becoming more selective. Nearly two-thirds of all the jobs in our metropolitan area now require workers to have some post-secondary education. By 2013, more than 80% of the 23 million new jobs will require some post-secondary education. Yet 46% of our youth do not even finish high school.

While wages in our region are falling, housing costs are climbing at a far greater rate than the national average. To make matters worse, the affordable housing that does exist is generally not located near the jobs for working families—and this unfortunate disparity translates into rising transportation costs for those who can least afford it. Currently, working families are spending an average of 20% of their household budgets on transportation.

Your United Way support provides: English-as-a-Second-Language classes and GED programs to help adults secure jobs that pay a living wage, specialized job training and placement to help workers build more promising career paths, transportation assistance and affordable daycare for families earning minimum wages.

An older gentelman