Summary In a time of austerity and low economic growth the challenges faced by low-waged workers in earning enough to support themselves and their families to achieve a socially acceptable standard of living are immense. Identifying effective and sustainable pathways out of in-work poverty for these workers holds significant benefit for the workers, their families and the state. However for employers facing increasing expectations to view their employees' wage through a lens of social responsibility rather than purely productivity or market comparison, this can amount to another significant cost pressure, to be set against a general background of competing wage demands throughout the organisation's workforce. Understanding how effective different anti-poverty measures actually are for workers, and how sustainable they are as long-term measures to be engaged with by employers, is therefore crucial to the in-work poverty policy debate. A debate that is increasingly urgent as recent UK figures show in-work poverty to be currently outstripping that of poverty in workless households. This project provides a unique and valuable opportunity for a team of social scientists from the University of York and three important employers from the York labour market to work together on an applied research project that will help employers identify the likely effectiveness and sustainability of current measures being employed to reduce in-work poverty within their organisations. The project partners are the City of York Council (CYC), Joseph Rowntree Foundation/Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust (JRF/JRHT) and York St John University (YSJU). The research project and knowledge exchange will focus on one specific geographical labour market, York. However the challenges currently being faced by these three employers are not York specific. Therefore the investigation and development of effective and sustainable strategies to deal with in-work poverty within these three project partner organisations will have much relevance to many more employers (and workers) across the UK. To investigate which are the most effective and sustainable policies to reduce in-work poverty the project will undertake: 1. an employer and worker level analysis of the effects of the adoption of a living wage policy within the organisation and issues relating to the sustainability of the living wage commitment. Research which will not only be supporting CYC, JRF/JRHT and YSJU in their own organisation's adoption and sustainable embedding of the living wage policy but it will also provide an important evaluation of a wage policy considered to be a cornerstone of any anti-poverty employer stance, an evaluation which will have potential value to many more organisations in the UK. 2. an assessment of the constraints and challenges currently being faced by workers from the three project partner workforces will be undertaken through the design and collection of two surveys; the first will be a survey of a sample of workers (about 500 workers) earning below a particular wage rate at the three partner organisations. The second will be a survey that follows-up a sample of workers (about 40 workers) who responded to the first survey and were found to be experiencing or at risk of in-work poverty. Both surveys will allow an assessment of how effective current anti-poverty policies engaged with by the employers actually are for the workers. 3. an analysis using national and regional data on wage distributions, wage growth, and in-work poverty over time to provide a framing or background to the discussion of which are the most effective and sustainable pathways out of in-work poverty. This analysis will help to generalise the project findings beyond the York labour market and set the experiences of the project partners' York based employees into a national context.