Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2023 number 2

Introduction. Poverty, as one of the acute and painful problems, is organically inherent in the human community at all stages of existence. Direct and indirect evidence of its negative manifestation is found in various areas of public life - economic, political, social, spiritual. Poverty is a source of dissatisfaction with people’s lives, the basis of deprivation, threatens the social security of society. The ideological and economic crisis that occurred after the collapse of the USSR, in addition to macro-social in general, entailed microsocial changes that occurred in the composition of the poor. It provoked the emergence of a specific stratum of the socially vulnerable population, the “working poorˮ. For the first time these words were uttered by the Deputy Prime Minister of the Government of the Russian Federation O. Y. Golodets in 2017. She drew attention to the uniqueness of this phenomenon. With this material we are trying to answer the question: who are they, the working poor today and what are their specific characteristics? Methodology. Methodologically, the analysis of the phenomenon of the working poor is carried out within the framework of structural, stratification, comparative and socio-cultural approaches, which make it possible to identify a complex of interdependent equivalent subjective and objective characteristics of the object under study. Discussion. The conducted research made it possible to analyze the studied object and explicate its definition. The working poor are a part of society represented by educated, skilled employed people who, due to the deterioration of the economic situation in the state, have found themselves on the brink of poverty, their income is not enough for satisfying life. The specific characteristics of the studied socio-demographic group are identified and considered: economic, professional, demographic, socio-cultural, emotional and psychological. Conclusion. A retrospective analysis of the phenomenon of poverty allowed us to state the fact that the working poor have existed in the Russian space at all times. During the Soviet period, they made up the bulk of the population. Lexically, this phenomenon was not designated in any way, its soft veiled form was used - poverty. This phenomenon is quite traditional for us, it existed latently, manifesting itself in critical periods for the state. Today, it is included in the realities of modern life in a new way.