Despite the president-elect’s claim that there are “no jobs,” the labor market has improved at a remarkably steady rate as the country worked its way out of the deep recession. During the past six years, there has been job growth each and every month, and a 5 percentage point drop in the unemployment rate. In part, that’s due to President Obama’s Recovery Act, which stimulated growth, provided aid to states, and invested in infrastructure. The rescue of the auto industry saved at least 1 million jobs, and kept an entire region out of a severe depression.

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In 2015, most Americans finally started to feel the benefits of the recovery. Income rose for the typical American household, and the poverty rate saw one of the largest single-year declines in almost 50 years—primarily due to improvements in the labor market.

As steady as the recovery has been, the United States has not yet reached a full employment economy. There are still too few jobs, too few hours, and too slow wage growth for millions of people who are willing and able to work. Along with a strong safety net, decent jobs and wages for low-income people and their families is one of the most effective methods of reducing poverty.

If the next administration genuinely wants to create decent jobs, it will need to do much more than strike piecemeal deals with individual companies. It should work with the Federal Reserve to prioritize full employment, and make sure that we get there by keeping interest rates low until there is consistently strong wage growth. It should also take steps—some of which were taken by President Obama—to make sure these jobs make it possible for people to support themselves.

Raise the Minimum Wage

Despite what some policymakers and pundits suggest, a significant share of poor people already work—and their wages and benefits from that work are their main source of income. The problem is that their wages are too low. Full-time, year-round minimum wage workers don’t make enough to support a single person, much less a family. For people who rely on the federal tipped minimum wage of $2.13 per hour—disproportionately women and people of color—the struggle can be even harder.

Congress has failed to raise the federal minimum wage for seven years, so Obama relied on executive action when he could. He raised the minimum wage to $10.10 for all federal contractors, many of whom work at poverty-level wages. Some individual states also raised their minimum wages, which is correlated with faster wage growth for low-wage workers.

The rest of the country is long overdue for a raise too, and Trump has—at times—promised to give it to them. However, given how opposed Trump’s pick for Labor Secretary is to even a modest increase, it’s unlikely that the new administration will take this action on behalf of workers.

Enforce and Update Labor Standards

Workers lose tens of billions of dollars a year due to wage theft, when employers fail to pay minimum wage, overtime, payroll taxes, or worker’s compensation premiums. Stolen pay can add up quickly for low-wage employees, and it can make the difference between making rent or facing eviction. Stronger enforcement of labor standards that guard against wage theft, and updates to outdated standards—such as increasing the overtime threshold and eliminating the tipped minimum wage—would especially benefit low-income workers.

Under Obama, the Department of Labor (DOL) implemented contracting regulations that include not only a higher minimum wage, but also address wage theft, on-the-job health and safety hazards, sexual harassment, race discrimination, and wage transparency. In addition, the Obama DOL applied the minimum wage and overtime regulations to the home health care industry, whose almost 2 million care workers are generally women of color and immigrants earning wages at or below the poverty line.

End Irregular Scheduling

Irregular work scheduling denies workers any dependability in their schedule or pay. That makes it nearly impossible for working parents to find child care, know whether they are going to get the hours they need, or coordinate schedules between multiple jobs. These employment practices are also more likely to affect low-wage workers who lack the leverage to push for better wages and hours, which leaves them facing job and income insecurity and a higher likelihood of falling into poverty. To remedy these problems, policymakers could enact laws to require minimum reporting pay and advance notice of worker schedules, allowing people to plan their lives and meet family responsibilities.

Provide Paid Sick and Family Leave

Seventy-three percent of the lowest wage private-sector workers lack a single paid sick day, and 96% do not have paid family leave through their employers. That leaves workers—particularly low-income workers—in an impossible position where they have to choose between getting paid or caring for themselves or their families. At best, a missed paycheck leads to many families and individuals making tough choices among expenses on basic needs; at worst, it can lead to hunger, homelessness, or worsening illness.

President Obama issued paid sick leave and paid family leave to federal workers and contractors, and while this is a step in the right direction, millions more workers need the same support. Extending earned sick leave and paid family leave to all workers will greatly impact the lowest-wage workers, who are 4.5 times more likely to lack paid sick time compared workers at the top of the wage distribution.

A Strong Safety Net

We need a strong and effective safety net for people who are unemployed, can’t work, or have jobs that pay poverty wages. For example, Obama’s expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit target working families and kept 9 million people out of poverty between 2009 and 2011; his extension of emergency unemployment compensation and extended unemployment insurance benefits lifted 2.5 million people out of poverty in 2012; and last year, Social Security benefits alone lifted 26.6 million people above the poverty line. Without stronger wage gains, particularly for lower-income workers, the safety net will need to continue to work harder every year simply to keep poverty rates from increasing.

But the safety net faces the possibility of historic cuts under a Trump Administration, with Social Security, housing assistance, Medicaid, and nutrition assistance all at risk. And that’s not even including the threat to the Affordable Care Act, which has reduced the share of Americans without health insurance to a record low and increased millions of Americans’ economic security.

As a new administration takes the baton, we need to strengthen efforts to help workers and reduce poverty.

Editor’s note: TalkPoverty presents this series in collaboration with the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality.

Despite dramatic gains in educational attainment, wages have failed to grow for those at the bottom (and middle) over the last four decades. At the same time, low income household incomes have become increasingly dependent on wages. The figure below shows the major sources of income for non-elderly households in the bottom fifth of the income distribution from 1979 to 2011, using the CBO’s measure of comprehensive income. It shows that incomes of the bottom fifth are increasingly dependent on ties to the workforce. Wages, employer-provided benefits, and tax credits that are dependent on work (such as the EITC) made up 68.3 percent of non-elderly bottom-fifth incomes in 2011, compared with only 58.2 percent in 1979. While government in-kind benefits from sources such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly food stamps) and Medicaid increased from 13.2 percent of these bottom-fifth incomes in 1979, to 19.5 percent in 2011, cash transfers such as welfare payments have declined 9.2 percentage points (from 18.6 percent to 9.4 percent).

For better or worse, the safety-net system has become increasingly tied to work through programs such as the EITC and the child tax credit, which only benefit households with labor earnings. While other transfers and tax credits are clearly important to families in the bottom fifth and should be strengthened, it is crucial to recognize that this group depends on pay from the labor market for the majority of their income.

In addition, despite what some policymakers and pundits might have us believe, a significant share of poor people work. The figure below shows the population of those in poverty segmented into various labor status categories. The top bar shows that 35.2 percent of the poor between the ages of 18 and 64 in 2013 were considered not currently eligible to work because they are retired, going to school, or disabled. The other 64.8 percent of working-age poor are currently eligible to work. The second bar shows us that among these currently-eligible workers, 62.6 percent are working and 44.3 percent are working full-time. Of the working-age poor eligible for employment, 37.4 percent are not working—a share that includes the 3.3 million unemployed poor people seeking a job.

On Labor Day this year, it’s important to recognize the integral role of wage growth in poverty reduction. Although hourly wage growth has stagnated for the vast majority since 1979, this didn’t have to happen—there was room in the economy for all people to see wage growth, as economy-wide productivity continuously reached new heights. In fact, if all wages had grown at the same rate as productivity since 1979 (in other words, had economic gains been more widely shared with low- and moderate-wage workers), 7.1 million fewer people would be poor and the market-based non-elderly poverty rate would be 2.6 percentage points lower today, or 13.5 percent. If we had also targeted full employment through Federal Reserve policy, for instance, the non-elderly market-based poverty rate would be 4.2 percentage points less and 11.2 million fewer people would be poor.

Policies that boost employment and wages are vital and underappreciated tools for reducing poverty. To gain momentum in the fight against poverty, fiscal transfers that help low-income families almost surely need to be accompanied by policies that foster widely shared wage growth. Without wage gains, the tax-and-transfer system needs to work harder every year simply to keep poverty rates from increasing. This Labor Day, let’s focus on the things we can do that will both help workers and reduce poverty, such as strengthening workers’ bargaining rights, raising the minimum wage, eliminating the tipped minimum wage, making sure the new overtime threshold quickly gets into place, enforcing wage theft rules, fighting for wider access to paid sick and family leave, and urging the Fed to target full employment.

People in poverty are working, now we need to make the economy work for them.

The figure below shows changes in real hourly wages throughout the wage distribution between 2013 and 2014. What is particularly striking is that almost every decile and the 95th percentile experienced real wage declines from 2013 to 2014, with two exceptions. First, there was a very small increase at the 40th percentile wage, up 3 cents, or 0.3 percent. But a more economically significant increase occurred at the 10th percentile where hourly wages were up 11 cents, or 1.3 percent.

So, why did wages at the bottom tick up when they fell for nearly everyone else? What is so special about that wage that sits below 90 percent and above 10 percent of workers (i.e., is not generally earned by particularly privileged workers)?

The answer is simple: we still have some labor standards that provide wage protections. More specifically, 18 states increased their minimum wage in 2014 (either through legislation or through automatic inflation adjustments). The states with minimum wage increases in 2014, displayed in green below, represent 57 percent of the workforce.

When we compare states with and without a minimum wage increase, we find clear evidence that the minimum wage is the reason people at the 10^th percentile wage didn’t see the negative trends found elsewhere in the workforce. The figure below compares the wages in these states with those in states without minimum wage increases. Wages at the 10^th percentile rose by 1.6% in states with minimum wage increases, while in states without such an increase, they pretty much stagnated—increasing by a scant 0.3%.

The great news in this story is that policy can actually affect the labor market. And, it is imperative that we use all the policy levers at our disposal to help rejuvenate the economy, create jobs, and build stronger wage and income growth for the 99%. 

There was once a strong statistical link between economic growth and poverty reduction, but rising inequality has severed it, and the results are deeply dispiriting. If the statistical link between economic growth and falling poverty that held before the mid-1970s had not been broken by rising inequality, then poverty, as the government measures it, would be virtually eradicated today. Furthermore, the impact of rising inequality is nearly five times more important in explaining poverty trends than family structure.

As the Economic Policy Institute has documented in our paper launching the Raise America’s Pay project, this rise in inequality is simply the flip side of nearly stagnant hourly wage growth for the vast majority of the American workforce in the three decades before the Great Recession. So how to reverse this wage-stagnation, especially for low-wage workers? Below is a list of proposals, all linked in their attempt to rebuild institutions that provide bargaining power to workers who have had it taken from them in recent decades.

The minimum wage is currently more than 25% below its real value in the late 1960s. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reports that the Harkin-Miller bill to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 would cumulatively boost incomes of people below the federal poverty line by $5 billion. And this is probably too conservative; other academic research finds that the same bill would lift more than 4 million people out of poverty. Among those who would see a raise from the Harkin-Miller bill, 55% are women and 25% are women of color. Nearly one-in-five kids would see at least one parent get a raise.

Another key policy priority should be efforts to level the playing field for workers to organize and form unions. The decline in unionization over the last several decades has led to increases in wage inequality and a loss of bargaining power for workers. And this bargaining power loss is not confined to union members themselves—unions often set wage-standards for entire sectors. Importantly, the decline in unionization is not a natural, inevitable phenomenon or a result of workers no longer wanting unions. It is the result of a policy decision to allow growing employer aggressiveness to tilt the playing field against organizing drives.

This policy choice is clear when one looks at the evidence. First, unionization has held up much better in the public sector where employers have less ability to fight organizing drives. Second, in 2007, the share of non-union workers who said they wanted to be represented by a union or similar organization reached an all-time high at over 50%.   There is a growing wedge between the desire to organize and bargain collectively and workers’ ability to do so. And, third, even the most obvious form of employer aggressiveness—the firing of workers who are trying to organize—has risen sharply in recent decades, according to the National Labor Relations Board.

The fact is that the decline of unions can explain approximately one-third of the growth of wage inequality among men and approximately one-fifth among women since the 1970s. This rising wage inequality is the key driver behind stagnant wages for workers at the bottom. When low-wage workers have been able to organize, unionization is  associated with higher wages and benefits for many, including: food preparation workers, cashiers, cafeteria workers, child-care workers, cooks, housekeepers, and home-care aides.

Reducing wage theft is also particularly important to low-wage workers. Wage theft occurs when employers withhold wages that are owed to a worker, for example by requiring workers to work off the clock or refusing to pay overtime. There is widespread evidence of these practices and more—from tipped workers not being paid their wages to Apple store employees being forced to stand in line after their shift while their bags are checked for merchandise. In nearly 9,000 investigations of the restaurant industry, the wage and hour division of the Department of Labor found that 83.8% of the shops investigated had wage and hour violations —underscoring the enforcement problems.

Millions of low- and moderate-wage workers have also seen slow wage growth because they are working overtime and not getting paid for it. This is because the real value of the salary threshold under which all salaried workers, regardless of their work duties, are covered by overtime provisions has been allowed to erode dramatically. Simply adjusting the threshold for inflation since 1975 would raise it to $984 per week (or $51,000 on an annual basis), from its current level of $455 ($24,000 annually). This simple adjustment would guarantee millions of additional workers time-and-a-half pay when they work more than 40 hours in a week.

Other labor market policies and practices, which, if changed, would increase the wages of low- and moderate-wage workers, include: the misclassification of employees, such as construction workers who are deemed independent contractors so that the employer doesn’t have to pay for workers’ compensation. Just-in-time scheduling occurs when employers schedule workers erratically and sporadically, and denies workers any regularity in their schedule or pay. Think about how difficult that is for working parents who need to support their families and also find child care, or for workers who need a second job to make ends meet. Finally, paid sick time, paid family medical leave, and flexible work hours, all would support workers and their families.

The social safety net remains crucial for low-income working families in this country and also needs reforms. Everything from shoring up SNAP to extending EITC to childless adults to expanding Medicaid to people in those states which refuse federal dollars. We also should have universal pre-K and affordable and high quality child care—we need to use every tool in our toolbox to give kids a chance of success, reducing inequality at the starting gate of kindergarten.

But, if we really care about children in our country, then we also need to raise the wages of parents working hard every day to lift their families out of poverty.  We need to enforce the labor standards we have, update the ones that need it, and put power back in the hands of workers to bargain for better working conditions for themselves and their families.