In-work poverty in Lithuania: causes and consequences

In-work poverty challenges the conventional understanding and explanation of poverty. The concepts of work and poverty were for a long time seen by policy makers as having little in common. However, official in-work poverty figures of the last decade reveal that employed people are not immune to poverty. What is more, incidents of in-work poverty are neither unique nor isolated. The most recent statistical data show that nearly 9 per cent of employees in the European Union are facing risk of poverty. Consequently, this phenomenon is gradually becoming a most pressing issue that, until recently, had been largely ignored by both the scientific community and policy makers in Europe. This dissertation examines the extent and nature of in-work poverty in Lithuania, a country that joined the EU in 2004. It aims to analyse the contextual determinants of in-work poverty in the country, as well as expose factual and experiential dimensions of the phenomenon. This study uses mixed research methods consisting of two main inquiry strategies: a quantitative examination of in-work poverty indicators and qualitative analysis of in-work poverty experiences. It uses both primary and secondary data analysis by combining empirical data drawn from the Eurostat statistical database with data collected via qualitative semi-structured interviews. Even though the research was conducted in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007-08, a time when in-work poverty rates in Lithuania escalated to unprecedented levels, the findings are contextualized as they represent an outcome of long-term structural arrangements and prevalent ideological discourse. The findings of this study challenge the dominant idea that creation of jobs and integration into the labour market can be considered a sustainable anti-poverty policy. It reveals that predictors of in-work poverty in Lithuania are primarily ingrained within the very structures that are often seen as safeguards against poverty in capitalist countries, namely, the labour market and welfare state