An Employee’s Living Wage and Their Quality of Work Life: How Important Are Household Size and Household Income?

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aut.relation.journalJournal of Sustainability Researchen_NZ
aut.researcherHaar, Jarrod
dc.contributor.authorCarr, S; Haar, J; Hodgetts, D; Arrowsmith, J; Parker, J; Young-Hauser, A; Alefaio-Tuglia, S; Jones, H
dc.date.accessioned2019-08-27T01:49:08Z
dc.date.available2019-08-27T01:49:08Z
dc.date.copyright2019en_NZ
dc.date.issued2019en_NZ
dc.description.abstractLiving 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.
dc.identifier.citationJournal of Sustainability Research, 1(1).
dc.identifier.doi10.20900/jsr20190007en_NZ
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10292/12771
dc.publisherHapresen_NZ
dc.relation.urihttps://sustainability.hapres.com/htmls/JSR_1041_Detail.html
dc.rightsCopyright © 2019 by the author(s). Licensee Hapres, London, United Kingdom. This is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
dc.rights.accessrightsOpenAccessen_NZ
dc.subjectLiving wage; Working poverty; New Zealand; Decent work; Job attitudes
dc.titleAn Employee’s Living Wage and Their Quality of Work Life: How Important Are Household Size and Household Income?en_NZ
dc.typeJournal Article
pubs.elements-id363186
pubs.organisational-data/AUT
pubs.organisational-data/AUT/Faculty of Business, Economics and Law
pubs.organisational-data/AUT/Faculty of Business, Economics and Law/Management
pubs.organisational-data/AUT/Faculty of Business, Economics and Law/NZ Work Research Institute
pubs.organisational-data/AUT/PBRF
pubs.organisational-data/AUT/PBRF Reviewers
pubs.organisational-data/AUT/PBRF Reviewers/PBRF Reviewers - Business Economics and Law
pubs.organisational-data/AUT/PBRF Reviewers/PBRF Reviewers - Business Economics and Law/Marketing, Advertising, Retailing and Sales Department - PBRF Reviewers
pubs.organisational-data/AUT/PBRF/PBRF Business Economics and Law
pubs.organisational-data/AUT/PBRF/PBRF Business Economics and Law/Faculty Review Team PBRF 2018
pubs.organisational-data/AUT/PBRF/PBRF Business Economics and Law/Management Department PBRF 2018
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