Deliberating Upon the Living Wage to Alleviate In-Work Poverty: A Rhetorical Inquiry Into Key Stakeholder Accounts.

Most developed nations have a statutory minimum wage set at levels insufficient to alleviate poverty. Increased calls for a living wage have generated considerable public controversy. This article draws on 25 interviews and four focus groups with employers, low-pay industry representatives, representatives of chambers of commerce, pay consultants, and unions. The core focus is on how participants use prominent narrative tropes for the living wage and against the living wage to argue their respective perspectives. We also document how both affirmative and negative tropes are often combined by participants to craft their own rhetorical positions on the issue.

Pandemic or Not, Worker Subjective Wellbeing Pivots About the Living Wage Point: A Replication, Extension, and Policy Challenge in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Recent pre-pandemic research suggests that living wages can be pivotal for enhancing employee attitudes and subjective wellbeing. This article explores whether or not the present COVID-19 pandemic is impacting pivotal links between living wages and employee attitudes and subjective wellbeing, with replication indicating robustness. Twin cohorts each of 1,000 low-waged workers across New Zealand (NZ), one pre- (2018), and one present-pandemic (2020) were sample surveyed on hourly wage, job attitudes, and subjective wellbeing as linked to changes in the world of work associated with the pandemic (e.g., job security, stress, anxiety, depression, and holistic wellbeing). Using locally estimated scatter-point smoothing, job attitudes and subjective wellbeing scores tended to pivot upward at the living wage level in NZ. These findings replicate earlier findings and extend these into considering subjective wellbeing in the context of a crisis for employee livelihoods and lives more generally. Convergence across multiple measures, constructs, and contexts, suggests the positive impacts of living wages are durable. We draw inspiration from systems dynamics to argue that the present government policy of raising legal minimum wages (as NZ has done) may not protect subjective wellbeing until wages cross the living wage Rubicon. Future research should address this challenge.

Reflections of a practitioner: purely a journey of the heart.

32 years ago a man from the villages of Manunu (Upolu) and Fagamalo (Savai'i) and a woman from the inner-town village of Matautu tai-Apia (Upolu) gave birth to their middle child and only daughter Siautu Tiomai Alefaio. The man left a prominent position in the police department's CIB in Samoa to become a factory worker in Hellaby Meats of Mt. Wellington, New Zealand. The woman, a beautiful dancer in Aggie Grey's dance troupe and also an upcoming photographer at the age of 12, left all her aspirations of education to attain a job in order to make enough money for the prospective dream of 'making it big' in the 'land free-flowing with milk and honey'--Aotearoa New Zealand. For some years Aotearoa was exactly that, with money enough to bring over all their other siblings and eventually their mothers. My father (now a Parish minister of a Presbyterian church) and mother (an Early-Childhood educator) both self-sacrificially gave up their own hopes and dreams to pursue a bigger one--of prosperity for future generations. As a registered psychologist I have seen many journey stories similar to mine, and it is my own hope and dream that our contribution as people from "Le Vasa Pasefika" (vast ocean of the Pacific region) will inevitably pave the way for future generations to embrace all that they are and become all that they have been called to be.