The Post: Luxon needs to live up to his maiden speech, and his beliefs

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This Easter, many kids will have got chocolate eggs; others got a slap in the face.

On April 1, the National-led government increased the minimum wage by a miserly 45c, or 2%, even though inflation is running at 4.7%. Tens of thousands of minimum-wage workers, and their families, were handed a metaphorical parcel marked, “Falling living standards inside”.

In his 2021 maiden speech, Christopher Luxon listed his Christian heroes, among them Kate Sheppard, Martin Luther King and the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, all people who looked out for the underdog. So some of us expected better from the prime minister. Maybe that makes us April Fools.

Still: charity, as they say, begins at home, and Luxon has an opportunity to address hardship in his own backyard.

Under the last government, core public sector employees were brought under the ambit of the living wage. Whereas the minimum wage, now $23.15 an hour, is a legal requirement, the living wage, soon to rise to $27.80, is voluntary.

It’s a rate an employer pays if they want to ensure staff have something above the bare minimum – and with it a chance of feeling they belong to, and can participate in, the society they have helped build. Life, in this view, shouldn’t be a matter of mere survival, of just putting food on the table. Work should enable a life of warmth and dignity, one where families can afford birthday presents and new clothes, maybe even a holiday or two.

Modelled on successful overseas campaigns, and launched here in 2012, the Living Wage Movement represents grassroots change, the agglomeration of energies of New Zealand’s churches, community groups and unions. Adept at mobilising frontline workers to tell their stories and win over business owners and politicians, the movement has signed up some 370 firms and organisations – including seven councils – that together employ 50,000 staff.

Each worker earns roughly $10,000 a year above the minimum wage. In an era when the people who keep the economy afloat – cleaners, bank tellers, retail staff and the like – have so often struggled to make headway, the living wage is a local success story, a beacon of light.

The last government, as well as placing core public sector employees on the living wage, began requiring state agencies to put their most vulnerable contractors – cleaners, caterers and security guards – onto the higher rate as their contracts came up for renewal. But when questioned this week whether he’d preserve the policy, Luxon gave a tepid answer.

Although change was “not a priority for us at the moment”, ministers would contemplate it “further down the road”. This uncertainty, as one Ministry of Health cleaner told The Post, creates “huge anxieties”.

If Luxon is to live up to the “compassion, tolerance and care for others” that, in his maiden speech, he said Jesus embodies, he surely must promise these low-paid, precarious contractors that they will indeed get the living wage.

He’d do well to remember, too, that ensuring work pays is hardly a crazed left-wing notion. Indeed it’s a core tenet of what is sometimes called compassionate conservatism, the belief that, even if large hierarchies are inevitable, everyone has responsibilities to each other. We all, in this view of things, share the same boat, and anyone in work should enjoy the full fruits of the Kiwi dream.

Overseas, living wage advocates have included Britain’s Conservative finance minister, George Osborne, and the “Big 4” accounting firms, which – like most employers – have found that staff paid the living wage are better motivated and quit less often, reducing turnover expenses and recouping some of the payroll costs immediately.

Closer to home, literally every bank in New Zealand is now a living wage employer, thanks in part to an endorsement by the Banking Association. And for many years now, the wage’s rate has been calculated by the Reverend Charles Waldegrave, in a fine instance of applied Christianity.

Over and above the 50,000 workers in formally accredited living wage organisations, there are, at any given moment, dozens of jobs advertised as paying that rate – even in firms that haven’t officially signed up.

For the movement’s executive director, Gina Lockyer, this shows the living wage “has become a really accepted thing, something that people aspire to”. More broadly, she thinks, “It’s changed the conversation about what a wage is designed to do and… what your life at home should look like as well”.

It’s even been mentioned on Shortland Street – a sure sign it has entered the vernacular. The movement’s plans now include getting more multi-nationals on board and pressing Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown to fulfil his promise to adopt the rate. And, of course, trying to ensure that our prime minister lives up to the values he espouses.