You Placed 200 Workers Last Year. The Households Are Still Sinking.

Your workforce program placed 200 people last year and never checked whether a single household survived the offer.

Here is the question nobody on your board asked: how many of those 200 workers earned enough to keep a roof over their family, child care covered, and food on the table at the same time?

Not sequentially. Simultaneously.

The answer was not in your report. The placement was the finish line. The household was never part of the equation.

And your annual report called it a success.

The Math Your Program Never Runs

The median WIOA training program places participants into jobs paying $14.13 an hour. That is $29,388 per year. According to Harvard's Project on Workforce, which analyzed more than 75,000 federally funded training programs, over 40% of WIOA participants earn less than $25,000 annually (Harvard Kennedy School, 2023).

Now run it against what a household actually needs.

The MIT Living Wage Calculator, verified independently by SmartAsset and reported by CNBC in 2024, puts the basic-necessities threshold for a family of four at $106,903 per year. Not savings. Not vacations. Not emergencies. Just housing, child care, transportation, health care, and food.

Here is the subtraction stack:

• Average WIOA program placement wage: $29,388
• Partner income (national median part-time): $18,000
• Combined household income: $47,388
• Basic necessities for a family of four: $107,000
• The gap: -$59,612

Your program counted the placement. The household is $59,612 short of surviving.

And this is the conservative estimate. In Massachusetts, the threshold is $150,578. On Long Island, it is $137,418. The national floor of $107,000 is the most generous reading of the data. Your program did not clear it.

The Thompson Household: Month by Month

Lamar Thompson completed a 12-week logistics training program in March. His workforce provider celebrated the placement: $15.50 an hour at a regional distribution center. Full-time. Benefits eligible after 90 days.

Here is what the program never modeled.

Month 1. Lamar's gross monthly income is $2,687. Rent is $1,450. Keisha works part-time at $12.50 an hour, bringing in $1,083. Combined: $3,770 before taxes. After rent, they have $2,320 for everything else a family of four needs to function.

Month 2. Child care for Jaylen and Nia costs $1,100 per month. Transportation to two jobs across town: $485. They are now at $735 for food, utilities, health care co-pays, and the rest of life.

Month 3. Jaylen needs shoes for school. Nia has a dental visit not covered under Medicaid. The $735 is gone by the 18th. Keisha picks up a weekend shift, but the child care math no longer works when both parents work weekends. Sixty-one percent of parents with children have no formal child care arrangement (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022). The Thompsons just joined that statistic.

Month 4. Lamar's car needs a $400 repair. There is no emergency fund because the household has been running a deficit since day one. He misses two shifts. The distribution center issues a final warning.

Month 5. Lamar is terminated. The workforce program records this as a successful 90-day retention. The dashboard is green. The Thompson household is in crisis.

No one ran the household math before the placement. No one modeled whether $15.50 an hour could sustain a family of four in their zip code. The program measured the hire. It missed the household.

This Is Not One Family. This Is the Architecture.

The Thompson story is not an outlier. It is the median outcome of a system that measures placements without modeling households.

• 41.3% of all U.S. households fall below the ALICE Threshold of Financial Survival (United Way, 2024).
• Formerly incarcerated workers earn just 53% of the median U.S. worker's wage, and that suppression persists for years after release (Prison Policy Initiative, 2022).
• In North Carolina, individuals who found employment after leaving prison in 2021 earned a median of just $7,300 per year (NC Department of Commerce, 2021).
• The median WIOA training participant earns less than a worker without a high school diploma, who averages $31,512 (Harvard Project on Workforce, 2023).

Every one of these data points intersects at the same place: the household. And every workforce program in the country reports placement rates without touching it.

Three Shifts That Close the Gap

From placement metrics to household math

Run the household income model before the placement. Take the target wage, multiply by 2,080 hours, and subtract local housing, child care, and transportation costs using county-level data. If the subtraction stack comes back negative, the placement is not a success. It is a setup.

MIT Living Wage Calculator: livingwage.mit.edu

United Way ALICE Threshold data: unitedforalice.org

Set a Household Stability Target alongside the placement target. Define success as combined household income reaching 80% of the local ALICE Threshold within 18 months. Track it quarterly. Report it to your board.

ALICE Income Thresholds by state: unitedforalice.org/state-overview

EPI Family Budget Calculator: epi.org/resources/budget

Integrate 2Gen support architecture into the placement pipeline. Child care access, transportation subsidies, and benefit cliff navigation are not program add-ons. They are the infrastructure that determines whether the placement survives past 90 days.

Durability Index Self-Assessment: khalilosirisconsulting.com/durability-index

Child Care Aware locator: childcareaware.org

Run the subtraction stack this week. Set your Household Stability Target within 30 days. Score the Durability Index before your next placement.

Who Owns This

• Workforce boards: Run the subtraction stack on every program in your portfolio before the next reauthorization cycle.
• Employers: Ask your workforce partners what household income threshold their placements are designed to reach.
• Program directors: Model the household before you celebrate the hire using the MIT Calculator, which takes ten minutes.

The Decision

Your program placed 200 workers last year at a median of $29,388. Every one of those placements left a family of four $59,612 short of basic needs.

The tools exist. The MIT Calculator is free. The ALICE data is public. The Harvard data names the median. The math takes ten minutes.

If the subtraction stack comes back negative and you report the placement anyway, you are not documenting a success. You are documenting a household emergency with a start date.

What does your organization score on this?

Take the free Durability Index Self-Assessment. Twenty questions. Five domains. One score.

Take the Assessment \u2192

Until next time, keep building what they said couldn't be built.

Khalil Osiris

Author & Founder, Khalil Osiris Consulting | Market Architect, 2Gen Economy Workforce Ecosystem | Fair-Chance Hiring \u00b7 Household Stability \u00b7 Workforce Durability | Publisher, The Durability Economy

Subscribe: If this edition of The Durability Economy challenged your thinking, share it with a colleague. Already measuring household impact? Tell me about it. I might feature your work in a future edition.

Change the metrics. Change the outcomes.

References

Harvard Kennedy School, Project on Workforce. \"Navigating Public Job Training.\" David Deming, Alexis Gable, Rachel Lipson, Ark\u0101dijs Zvaigzne. March 2023.

MIT Living Wage Calculator via SmartAsset/CNBC. \"The salary a family of 4 needs to get by in every U.S. state.\" June 2024. Data updated February 2025.

United Way / United For ALICE. National ALICE Report, 2024. unitedforalice.org.

Prison Policy Initiative. \"New data on formerly incarcerated people's employment.\" February 2022.

NC Department of Commerce. \"Insights on Post-Prison Job Quality from the NC Reentry Outcome Study.\" 2021.

U.S. Census Bureau. Analysis of 2022 Survey of Income and Program Participation: child care arrangements. November 2023.