DOL Awards $150k+ to Expand Portable Retirement Savings for Low-Wage Workers

The Department of Labor (DOL) on Sept. 22 announced that it has awarded more than $150,000 in research grants to expand portable retirement savings plans for low-wage workers. The DOL had announced the program in the summer and accepted applications through Aug. 26.

The DOL’s Women’s Bureau has awarded $153,836 from the Portable Retirement Benefits Planning grant program. The program is intended to help workers — especially those who are female and in low-wage occupations — who lack access to employer-provided retirement benefits.

The DOL has awarded the grants to the following recipients:

• The Brazilian Worker Center, Inc., which will receive $25,000 to conduct research on the development of a prototype mobile platform to provide benefits, including retirement benefits, to predominantly low-wage, domestic- and direct-care workers;

• The Heartland Alliance for Human Needs and Human Rights, which will receive $75,000 to conduct a needs assessment of Illinois’ economically vulnerable and low-wage workers who lack access to an employer-provided retirement savings plan and also will research barriers preventing those workers from participating in the Illinois Secure Choice Savings Program; and

• The Fair Work Center, which will receive $53,836 to conduct a needs assessment among low-wage workers, employers and benefits providers to understand the challenges and barriers low-wage workers face in saving for retirement.

The need for such research and for portability of retirement benefits, says the DOL, is heightened
by increasing mobility from job to job, the number of workers who are independent contractors or hold multiple jobs.