The Willis War On Wages
The Queen Of Mean Strikes Again! 27 /3/25
Finance Minister Nicola Willis has indicated she wants to pay less money to the people who clean her office and toilet, or who look after her security, by removing the Living Wage requirement government contractors are obliged to pay their employees.
But, before we get into the meanness of her proposal, let’s unpack how it translates in dollar terms for, say, a cleaner.
The Adult Living Wage is defined as the income necessary to provide workers and families with the basic necessities of life, enabling them to live with dignity and participate actively in society, and every year the rate is independently calculated and updated by the Family Centre Social Policy Research Unit.
The current Living Wage is $27.80 an hour which was an increase of $1.80 an hour over the previous year .
Below the Living Wage is the Minimum Wage.
Let’s just think about this term MINIMUM wage means for a moment. It’s the lowest hourly rate an employer has to pay an employee without breaking the law. If the law wasn’t there you can bet your boots a lot of workers would be paid even less.
The current Minimum Wage is currently $23.15 an hour, but due to rise a massive 0.35 cents to $23.50 an hour on April 1st.
So, let’s imagine you have full a time job on the Minimum Wage and you are working a 40 hour working week, you will be receiving $48,152.00 per year before tax. But your net take home pay net will be $39,949.67 per year or $768.26 per week. Of course if you have a Kiwisaver or a Student loan you’ll be taking home less.
After rent, power ,transport, electricity, phone costs, and what have you are deducted you won’t have much left for food, especially as the cost of living keeps rising.
Why is Willis (on a base salary of $6021 a week ) so determined to punish the people who were praised as “essential workers” in the darkest days of the Covid 19 pandemic? Because neoliberal ideologues like Nicola Willis don’t think about the social impact of their belief that low wages and low taxes is the best way to run an economy.
Frankly, Willis’s war on wages is beyond economic short-sightedness. She seems to suffer from a serious ocular impairment that prevents her looking up at the wealthy who are getting away with an estimated $Billion a year in uncollected tax, and forces her to only. down at those who live on Struggle Street to see how she can make their lives more miserable by pinching a few dollars and cents from them.
What her fixation on keeping wages low does, of course, is increase the gap between the rich and the poor in our country, which in turn causes an increase in a host of social issues from crime to family violence and drug abuse.
But, Willis is blind to such things, and probably doesn’t understand why the sharper eyed NZ Herald cartoonist Rod Emmerson, often draws her dressed as Marie Anoinette, the last Queen of France whose arrogance and lack of empathy for those living in poverty resulted in … well.. I’m sure you know what happened to her.
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Hard to like this, it is beyond believe, but not unexpected for those who could see it coming. No matter how many times I tried to explain this before the election, people still believed the myth this person could be a better finance minister than Grant Robertson. I tried to share your posts on the community pages of my town but they get removed due to being too political. It appears the public wants to know whose cat/dog is on the loose or why the sirens are going off. Fair enough good activities happen too, but this is years of missing civic education leading to disinterest or no understanding of how politics affects our lives. Our 4th estate is not at all putting this right by a huge lack of analysis, simply doing the he said she said snippets. National Radio is sometimes doing a good job but there is not where the average listener is, they get lost in sad feedback spaces commandeered by shock jocks🙁
As School bus drivers my wife and I are on the living wage, this only happened because Labour changed the rules about Govt contractors, before this we were on the minimum wage - it has made a huge difference🙏🏽 We also cover a contract driver job for our company outside of School hours and I had to negotiate the hours with our boss - his excuse for shortchanging our hours was he had already given us a pay rise (to living wage) I soon shot that down by reminding him that he had to courtesy of the government😅 He paid the hours we asked for👍 and doesn’t spar with me much these days🤔😅 These neoliberal assholes are everywhere😏😜