We all have clients who are also employees who want to earn a better wage. When you are living in daily instability, one of the barriers faced is the benefits cliff.
What is the benefits cliff? If you have an employee earning lower wages, most likely they are also drawing on public assistance of some form—housing, food, electricity, or other things. It is hard to find stability with a lower wage. If this employee is offered a higher wage or a promotion, this amount of increased financial benefits can eliminate them from the federal or local benefits they are receiving.
The issue is, it isn’t an equal tradeoff.
Most times, the employee ends up with less money than before the increase in wages.
Recently, a national survey was done by the Center for Social Development at Washington University on the impact of the benefits cliff on lower-wage employees. Click here to access the survey.
One of the concepts we discuss in the Workplace Stability book and the Workplace Stability workshop is the benefits cliff. This body of work is investigating the environments of economic class and how the environments impact the success of employees and business. Great low-cost strategies are offered to business executives to improve stability, retention, and productivity.
