Abstract
Work may be a panacea for poverty but the world of work in 2018 is characterised by ‘Working Poverty,’ including poor wages. Living wages are a contested idea for resolving the paradox, with empirical evidence on how they might do so being scarce. Theoretically, a living wage enables people to escape from poverty traps, indicated by qualitative improvements in quality of work and life beyond a set income. Alternatively, diminishing marginal returns suggest that any wage is a good wage, particularly at low pay levels. We explored these possibilities with almost 900 low-income workers across two diverse countries, New Zealand and South Africa, on reliable indicators of workplace justice, job quality, and life satisfaction. A coherent pattern occurred: trap-rise-pause-rise. At wages below ± $2000 per month, workers felt trapped in injustice, disengagement and dissatisfaction; above, they reported the opposite. This rise was starker in South Africa, where income inequality was highest. After a pause in satisfaction level (rising aspiration/relative deprivation), levels rose, with diminishing marginal returns. This pattern of trap-rise-pause-rise links two ‘competing’ theories of sustainable livelihood. Each matters but at different points on one wage spectrum. Wages may become ‘living’ only once they get ahead of a cusp in a wages-wellbeing curve, at a point or range determined empirically. Replicating this pattern across two very different countries suggests robustness, and may be a promising step towards a science of sustainable livelihood. However, we still require more systematic sampling, across more countries and groups, before the findings may be generalized.
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Notes
LOESS procedures also have differing “kernel functions,” which vary the weightings on the closest versus extreme data points, relative to the current point of estimation. We varied this function across all seven of the major alternatives but found little or no difference across any of them, for any given pair of variables. We therefore report results from the relatively balanced SPSS default option, Epanechnikov (IBM 2014).
We are grateful to Louella Carr for this suggestion.
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Acknowledgements
We wish to express our appreciation for some invaluable feedback from three peer reviewers of an earlier version of this manuscript. This feedback transformed our own understanding of the data and has accordingly in places even been incorporated verbatim. For seed funding and financial support, we thank the following organizations and people: Tshwane University of Technology/Dept. for Higher Education & Training (DHET); Humanitarian Donation Ines Meyer; Vice-Chancellor Discretionary Fund, Massey University; ARA Institute of Canterbury. Thanks to William Cochrane, University of Waikato (for suggesting LOESS curves). We remain grateful to two peer reviewers and supportive editors for their feedback on a related but different manuscript on this topic. Research in this paper was jointly presented, by invitation, at the International Congress of Psychology held in Yokohama Japan (2016). It was also presented, by invitation in each case, at the Science Forum South Africa: Igniting Conversations about Science (2016 and 2017); the Asian Psychological Association; the University of Geneva; the Academy of Management; the UN Social Commission in New York City; Rotary Club in Albany Auckland; the American Psychological Association; Pace University; Fordham University, New York. These presentations were part supported by EPIC (End Poverty & Inequality Cluster), at Massey University, Aotearoa/New Zealand.
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Carr, S.C., Maleka, M., Meyer, I. et al. How can wages sustain a living? By getting ahead of the curve. Sustain Sci 13, 901–917 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-018-0560-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-018-0560-7