Browsing by Author "Jones H"

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    An Employee’s Living Wage and Their Quality of Work Life: How Important Are Household Size and Household Income?
    (Hapres Co Ltd, 2019-07-01) Carr SC; Haar J; Hodgetts D; Arrowsmith J; Parker J; Young-Hauser A; Alefaio-Tuglia S; Jones H
    Living Wage (LW) campaigns normally assume a prototype household configuration in setting their LW rate, comprised of number of dependent householders and the number of incomes. This information is used to calculate the hourly pay rate required to sustain their quality of life and work life. Real households are nonetheless diverse in terms of number of householders and incomes, rendering the living wage conceptually more of a continuous variable than a single constant, across a wage spectrum. We explored this spectrum and its links to job attitudes with a nationally representative sample of N = 1011 low-waged New Zealanders. We measured each participant’s: hourly pay rate, number of household dependents and total household income, alongside individual job attitudes indicative of quality of work life (job satisfaction, work engagement, career satisfaction, meaningful empowerment, affective commitment, organizational citizenship behaviours and work-life balance). As a set, job attitudes consistently pivoted upwards into positive values approximating the campaign LW rate in New Zealand, regardless of either number of household dependents or household income (net of personal wage). However household income net of personal wage (unlike number of household dependents) buffered the gradient of the pivot upwards. The gradient was steeper (more clearly transformational and binary) among lowest-waged workers, in single-income households. To the extent that job attitudes as a set are already widely linked to individual and unit-level productivity, paying at or above the living wage threshold may bring productivity gains and thereby contribute toward decent work and economic development combined.
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    How Decent Wages Transform Qualities of Living – By Affording Escape from Working Poverty Traps
    (Hapres Co Ltd, 2021-03-31) Carr S; Young-Hauser A; Hodgetts D; Schmidt W; Moran L; Haar J; Parker J; Arrowsmith J; Jones H; Alefaio-Tugia S
    Research in this journal has suggested that job satisfaction and other job attitudes in New Zealand undergo a quantitative shift upwards once wages cross a pivotal wage range. However, the focus did not extend to actual changes in qualities of living beyond work. A fresh analysis of additional qualitative responses to the question, “How well does your wage work for you?”, from the same survey of N = 1011 low-income workers across New Zealand, content-analysed diverse qualities of living along a wage spectrum from Minimum to Living Wage, crossed with household income net of own pay (using median wage as a splitting factor). Converging with the quantitative research reported earlier, there was a reliable pivot range upwards in qualities of living as wages first rose from Minimum Wage, to become transformational after crossing the Living Wage value. This transformational effect of a Living Wage was most clearly pivotal when there was no buffer from any other incomes in the same household. A further, more idiographic analysis of case “outliers” from the wage-wellbeing curve (lower wage-higher satisfaction, plus higher wage-lower satisfaction) revealed additional contextual factors that moderated and mediated qualities of living. Examples included acute sense of a workplace injustice and reduced mental wellbeing. Such factors further inform the ILO’s and UN’s 2016–30 Decent Work Agenda, which includes justice and wellbeing at work.
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    Pandemic or Not, Worker Subjective Wellbeing Pivots About the Living Wage Point: A Replication, Extension, and Policy Challenge in Aotearoa New Zealand
    (Frontiers Media S.A, 2022-07) Carr SC; Haar J; Hodgetts D; Jones H; Arrowsmith J; Parker J; Young-Hauser A; Alefaio-Tugia S
    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.