If a family is unable to secure housing assistance or Medicaid, it can be technically above the poverty line yet still be deeply impoverished. The other options pose tricky problems. Alternatively, expanding the EITC to cover the gap might deter employers from paying their workers adequately, knowing that taxpayers would make up the difference. We don't know exactly how high the minimum wage could be raised or how far the EITC could be expanded without causing these undesirable results, so there's room to experiment. And experiment we should.
Unionization fills in another piece of the puzzle.
And recent successes in unionizing health care workers in California and in conducting a national campaign to lift the wages of janitors suggest larger possibilities ahead. But here, too, we eventually run into the same economic wall. As with the minimum wage, there's a limit to how high unionized wages can go before employers find it cheaper to automate the jobs, cut back on staffing, or not offer the services to begin with. The key to making work pay is encouraging employers to pay higher wages to people at the bottom. This would happen if the Fed allowed the economy to grow so fast that demand for low-wage workers exceeded the supply, with the result that their wages were bid upward.