"lowest stratum" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It refers to the lowest level or layer of something, often in a hierarchical or social context. For example: - The homeless population occupies the lowest stratum of society. - In this organization, the interns are at the lowest stratum, while the executives make up the highest. - The poorest, most disadvantaged communities are often found in the lowest stratum of a country's economic system.
The definition of underclass is "the lowest stratum of society, usually composed of the disadvantaged".
In India, manual scavengers, who clean dry latrines, face severe social discrimination as they belong to the lowest stratum of India's caste-based society – the Dalits, formerly known as "untouchables".
"These young people exchange sex for money not because they are being held and trafficked as sex slaves," the authors wrote, but because they "exist at the lowest stratum of a socio-economic and cultural system that is failing them".
The government estimates that the number of people in this lowest stratum grew by 800,000, to 85 million people, even as the economy grew by a robust 9percentt.
Lumpenproletariat, (German: "rabble proletariat"), according to Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto, the lowest stratum of the industrial working class, including also such undesirables as tramps and criminals.
One of his most fruitful concepts, superstratification, deals with changes resulting from the introduction of a new group forming the lowest stratum of a society.
Thayil's exploration of opium dens and its denizens penetrates through the lowest strata of Mumbai society to find a space of surprising clarity.
He has been right about a great deal, but mainly about the shape of the internet and how it filters down to the lowest strata of society.
Students of Hindu culture will be familiar with the "untouchables", a term applied to the lowest strata of society in what is now India and Pakistan.
When its extraterrestrial passengers emerge, they are sequestered in a sprawling shantytown and shunned by even the lowest strata of human society.
"Many Somalis are also affected by stress, anxiety and loss of self-esteem due to being relegated from a position before the civil war where many had properties, jobs and were financially well-off, to the lowest strata of society in the UK".
