Helen Watson White
Power to Win: The Living Wage Movement in Aotearoa New Zealand by Lyndy McIntyre (Otago University Press, 2024), 276pp, $45
When a book like this is categorised as non-fiction, I feel the term doesn’t do justice to its content or its style. Its factual nature is only part of the product—and probably not the most appealing part. Rather, this is a book of stories.
Take Muriel’s, for instance:
‘My life was located in the whānau … The values of aroha and manaakitanga were very strong. There was always a pot of kai on the stove. We always had visitors and cousins and aunties staying.’ Her father worked at Odlins timber mill, on the Petone foreshore. There were plenty of jobs, although not all were well paid. The family lived in a house provided by the company but it wasn’t flash, and every year Muriel’s mother papered the walls to keep out the southerly that blew across the harbour. But while living standards were low, their values of whānau and looking out for others were strong.
While Lyndy McIntyre’s personal story begins in a small Hutt Valley suburb where ‘the mums stayed home and every dad had a job’, she perceives the Living Wage Movement (LWM) as originating in a nationally significant event: the passing into law of the Employment Contracts Act 1991 (ECA). The first scenario—shared with Muriel Tunoho (Tainui/Raukawa)—is a communal one, where workers’ children grew up being part of each other’s families. The employment (and socioeconomic) situation post-ECA, McIntyre shows, was profoundly different. Collective bargaining and a national award system gave way to an employer’s separate contracts with individuals or with small groups of employees.
The ECA introduced an individualistic philosophy from the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s, when a Labour Government turned right around, rejecting its own origins in the Labour movement of the earlier twentieth century. The primacy of ‘the market’ and the corporatisation of public services, writes McIntyre, led to the rise of the contractor providing services to business. If you weren’t an employer, you were competing for work, with contractors forced into a ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of the wages they would or could tender to pay.
In McIntyre’s counter-story, you can see a painfully gradual—but ultimately successful—drive to reinstate communal values in the process of determining what is an appropriate ‘living wage’. It is a moral question, seeking a sort of communal accord. The movement carefully calculates how much employers should be asked to pay, to ensure the standard of living that workers’ families need. The ethos of the movement, importantly, is that it is voluntary. The aim is to bring evaluations from a cross-section of society to the question not only of what one’s labour is worth but what it costs families to lead their lives. Society itself provides the argument and the impetus to shift workers into an economic state in which they are ‘thriving, not surviving’.
In many ways, it has been the process of securing a living wage—not just the additional income—that has benefited our whole society. The main theme of the book is the necessity to campaign on a broad front, because everyone is affected when a large sector of the population is kept in poverty. The book describes the formation of an alliance among various groups: not only unions, but also community and faith-based organisations, all of which are grounded in a shared commitment to the public good—public ‘welfare’ or wellbeing. It’s probably written into their constitutions and mission statements, but beyond that, it is also generally assumed. Coming together with a common purpose helps build community, creating the foundation for further meetings, personal or social, over common concerns.
Unions have been demanding fair wages in Aotearoa since 1840, when Samuel Parnell famously proposed a 40-hour week and better conditions for Wellington workers, underlining his demands with the threat of collective action. Over time, the language used in bargaining came to include the idea that a wage-earner needed to earn enough to support a family, which, in those days, was typically larger than it is now. When women began to work outside the home, further movements emerged—first against the exploitation of female labourers (seamstresses) in the 1890s, and later in support of Equal Pay for women from the 1960s, culminating in the Equal Pay Act of 1972. By 2000, however, despite some advances on the parity front, women still made up the majority of low-paid workers who—through no fault of their own—could not raise themselves above the poverty line.
It is no accident that it was a woman who wrote this book, documenting the stories of a great many other women who have managed their households by working longer hours while going without themselves. She and the women she writes about have become co-leaders in a movement where gender equality was assumed from the start. For some, particularly those from migrant or refugee backgrounds, this sense of equality may have been a new experience. But their men had also been reduced to the lowest-paid jobs that no one else would do; they had been equal in poverty.
It is no accident, moreover, that it was a unionist who first proposed a new kind of action in the pursuit of a living wage, as opposed to the minimum wage. It was John Ryall, in 2005 elected General Secretary of the Service and Food Workers Union (SFWU, later E tū), who developed the idea of making alliances not just to support a particular union’s efforts, but to ground a campaign in the lived experience of people in the community. Having spent many years trying to lift the wages of the lowest paid through the only methods left available to unions post-ECA, he knew things had to change.
McIntyre relates how she and Ryall, who shared a background in community activism and worked for the same union in 2011, agreed they should put their energy into ‘giving members a voice to tell the stories that exposed the reality of lives on low pay and to build broad community support to change that reality’.
In 2006, Ryall and his wife Muriel Tunoho had visited the UK and witnessed the collaborative work of the London Citizens Workers Centre, an organisation funded by churches, unions and local authorities to support migrant workers to stand up for their rights. Through Deborah Littman, an organiser for the public sector union UNISON, they learned of a campaign that had been running for some years, for a ‘living wage’ that was above the level of basic survival and ‘meant workers and their families could live in dignity and participate in society’.
Most impressive to the activist couple was the enthusiasm of participant workers, who were empowered to advocate for themselves rather than just being represented by others. ‘These were marginalised workers that unions weren’t reaching: cleaners, hotel housekeeping staff and others employed by contractors and subcontractors,’ Ryall explained. Tunoho elaborated: ‘To turn up at that hall and see the richness of cultural diversity … it had a different feel. It wasn’t a meeting dominated by union officials, but it had a clear kaupapa. Both of my worlds—of working in the community and being a union leader—came together.’
You can sense that same enthusiasm in every page of this story-filled book. In planning their campaign, the LWM organisers have gone for action-packed public meetings, not just forums tied to national and local body elections, but also parties celebrating every small success, each one achieved through collaborative effort, with the stories of workers themselves at the fore. From a forum in October 2011, where Parliament’s cleaners invited politicians to hear their experiences of life on low pay, photos show some very sad faces, of good people obviously tired and used to difficulty. Such documentary pictures have a raw honesty that speaks volumes. But the majority of the photographs, from ‘Rapping Reverend’ Mua Strickson-Pua celebrating the Auckland launch of LWM in 2012, to a diverse delegation to Wellington City Council; from the Brass Razoo Solidarity Band leading a ‘Mop March’ for Wellington cleaners, to a packed student rally, and the announcement of the annually updated living wage in 2019 at Petone’s Seashore Cabaret: these are images of what the author calls ‘people power’, charged with positivity and expressing something of the passion many feel about this issue. Social justice is, after all, a matter of national concern.
Despite the preponderance of acronyms and dates, this is not a dry read. Everyone’s story—of their hopes and dreams as well as their enforced limitations—is different and therefore interesting. I was particularly moved by candid photographs of six low-paid workers taken by Eshan Hazaveh, collected and exhibited in June 2019 with a booklet of interviews made by historian Dr Cybele Locke and transmuted by Elizabeth Knox into 700-word stories. So many people have given every skill they have to this ongoing campaign.
The reason the campaign is ongoing is that this is not the simple project it seems. While some institutions have agreed, when challenged, to sign up to pay their direct employees the asked-for wage, they have baulked at extending the commitment to workers employed under contract to another entity, such as an outsourced cleaning business. To gain accreditation as a Living Wage Employer, they must not only follow through with their stated commitment but also make it universal for those within their jurisdiction. Gone is the time when, as in Patricia Grace’s The Dream Sleepers, an invisible army of cleaners rises before midnight to come into the capital from Porirua or Naenae to clean the offices of the city’s rich and powerful, then slink away home before anyone knows they’ve been there. They have been acknowledged, recognised, and—finally—rewarded for their work.
On the other hand, as noted on page 200 of McIntyre’s detailed and painstaking account—covering the countless meetings organised, submissions presented, obstructions overcome, relationships built, employers approached, and individuals interviewed—I read that the number of ‘accredited employers, large and small, in the private, public and NGO sectors’, had reached 160 by 2019. That’s not very many, but each business persuaded is a significant gain, whether it is AMP Capital Investors or Western Springs College, New Zealand’s first accredited secondary school. The message that every individual deserves recognition extends to businesses of all sizes, including Scout Hair (the first accredited hairdresser) and Mai Day Spa (the first accredited massage therapist). It’s like the anti-nuclear movement: no entity is too small to play a part.
This is a thoroughly researched book that carries notes, a timeline and full index. It is clear McIntyre has had access to some of our best minds for the articulation of the living wage idea. She chooses Charles Waldegrave to sum up the experience:
The living wage has a transparent logic about it. The calculations and final costs are set out logically in the five-year reviews. They provide an empirical basis for arriving at the reasonable costs for the living wage. The minimum wage has no such logic. It neither sets out a budget for key costs nor provides a justification of how it is adequate for those on modest incomes.
In answer to the question that many ask about the difference between the living wage and the minimum wage, McIntyre gives us a graph comparing the two over the years 2012 to 2023. The graph shows that in 2013, when the living wage was introduced at over $18 per hour, the minimum wage was set at a low rate of under $14 per hour. The minimum wage is shown growing at a faster rate than the living wage, and by 2022, there is barely a dollar between them. For Annie Newman, one of the many leaders of this memorable movement, this means the minimum rate is now irrelevant, superseded by a clearly defined living wage, which has become, unarguably, ‘the baseline for lifting workers out of poverty’.
HELEN WATSON WHITE is a Dunedin writer with a background in university teaching, library work, editing and publishing. She has written many reviews of theatre, books, music, art and opera, as well as articles, short stories and poems. Her photographs have been exhibited in several galleries.
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