The proposal to remove the living salary requirement of public sector purchasing rules It turns the clock in a progressive step to evaluate the essential workers, argues Lyndy McIntyre.
On April 1, workers in the minimum wage will receive their annual salary increase, with their hours from $ 23.15 to $ 23.50. This represents an increase of 1.5%, 35 cents per hour. What 35 cents buy in a cost of living crisis? Try one fifth of a liter of Pak’nsave milk or a quarter of a cheaper sliced bread bread.
New Zealand’s salary will be updated on the same day. The current salary is $ 27.80 – $ 4.65 more than the current minimum. The decent wage rate will increase by the average wage movement.
Although the minimum wage is a poverty rate, the decent salary is a modest but decent rate, allowing workers and their families to live with dignity and participate in society. For our best paid workers, this is changing life.
One of these workers, Mele Peua, arrived in Aotearoa about 40 years ago. The 17 -year -old came from Tonga looking for a better life, “like a dream.” But the reality of low costs and high costs forced Mele to work three jobs: sewing during the day, working in a house of old at night and cleaning on weekends.
Over the years, Mele has continued to work all the time in minimum wage work. She and her husband, also a cleanser, had children. Mele says it was difficult. “We didn’t have family time. I never went to school interviews with children. There has never been enough money for sports and school travel. It’s just the limit of our lives, how much we earned to survive and feed our children.”
Today, however, Mele and other employees for hired to clean or provide security or catering in the main public service receive the salary.
Since it was launched in 2012, a ranking goal of the salary movement has raised the salaries of the hired workers. Hiring has always been a race to the bottom, where proposals are overcome based on lower salary rates. Organizations that joined the goal of ending the payment of established poverty to expose the injustice of low wages to workers such as parliamentary cleaners who worked all night; Workers like Jaine Ikurere, who, after cleaning the prime minister’s office for 20 years, were still in the minimum wage.
The active wage movement has mobilized the broader community – unions, religious groups and community organizations – to ensure politicians’ commitments to raise the government’s wage contracted by the government. And that the power of the people initially won the wages worthy of Parliament’s own cleaning products, catering workers and security guards in 2017, then for the Ministry of Social Development security guards in 2020 and, over time, for more groups of workers hired in the public sector.
In the last term of the government, purchasing rules for the central public sector were changed to reflect what the standard increasingly was, including the requirement that the decent salary be paid to contracted cleaning products, security and catering.
Now the government wants to change these rules and take the wage worthy of workers like Mele. Using his “growth” hat, Nicola Willis proposed a “economic benefit test” that “would require government agencies to consider the broader benefit to New Zealand to grant contracts to companies in New Zealand when making purchasing decisions.” The decent salary requirement was removed from the proposed rules. “This is part of the plan to increase jobs and income, changing New Zealand to a faster growth track,” Willis said as he announced the proposal.
But this change would not increase jobs. It would take workers’ salaries behind. It is a cynical play to increase the cost of doing business for our best paid workers and returning the clock in a progressive step to evaluate the essential workers who work hard for the New Zealandes every day. And it arrives at a time when nearly $ 15 billion for tax cuts favor the few, including an inconvenience of $ 2.9 billion for owners, when food banks are forced to push people away, the non -tetus are rising and the rents are high. This attack on the poor who works will lead more New Zealandes to poverty.
National Secretary and Tū Rachel Mackintosh described the change as “disgusting and abominable,” saying, “If you are less than living salary, people are having to change food, power, gasoline and rent. You can’t meet all these expenses if you don’t have a decent salary.”
The struggle is to save the wage worthy of workers hired in the public service. Shipments to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment are open And we can let the MBie know that this is not fair, not right. Which is with the same mind and should be stopped. That New Zealandes want our government to give an example to lead the way to other employers; That we do not want hiring to be a race to the background, but a fair way to employ the invisible workforce of cleaning products like Mele. That we want to keep the wage worthy in government purchasing rules. That you cannot go back to growth.
