How can wages sustain a living? By getting ahead of the curve

Carr, Stuart C.; Maleka, Molefe Jonathan; Meyer, Ines; Barry, Marie-Louise; Haar, Jarrod; Parker, Jane; Arrowsmith, James; Yao, Christian; Hodgetts, Darrin; Jones, Harvey; Young-Hausner, Amanda; Afeaki-Mafile’o, Emeline; Rasmussen, Ann-Helen; Alefaio-Tugia, Siautu; Falealili, Ben; Mafile’o, Kate; Pikula, Tokilupe; Wolfgramm, Natassia; ‘Uhila, Holika; Falealili, Yvonne; Grueber, Arno; Berlim, Leo; Hausia, Emalata; Ntsweng, Mary; Koza, Jafta; Groothof, Doutzen; Schie, Susan van; Lyckholm, Isabel; Naithani, Abhigyan

doi:10.1007/s11625-018-0560-7

Cited by 75 publications

(64 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…", and a sample item is "compared to the line supervisors in your organization". The measure has been found to have good reliability [2,16], and had very good reliability in the present study (α = 0.83).…”

Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 62%

“…Despite this broad support, there is an acknowledgement that the psychology field understands less about those at the bottom of the pay spectrum, for example [2]. Carr et al [16] noted that, "Work may be a panacea for poverty, but the world of work in 2018 is characterized by 'Working Poverty'" (p. 901), reinforcing the point that our understanding of workers in low paying jobs is poor. We focus on pay fairness amongst the lowest paid workers of New Zealand, because this is the most appropriate form of organizational justice to examine, and this approach addresses gaps in our understanding.…”

Section: Pay Fairnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Carr et al [2] argued that a decent wage is important to the thriving of employees and is likely to play an important role in enhancing job satisfaction. Recent research has shown that there can be changes in lower income ranges [2,16,29], and thus, it might be overstating the theoretical pull of organizational justice around pay fairness to influence job satisfaction. It might be that those with the lowest pay are more likely to be thankful for any work, and thus register higher job satisfaction.…”

Section: Income Level As a Moderatormentioning

confidence: 99%

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Escape from Working Poverty: Steps toward Sustainable Livelihood

et al. 2018

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Working poverty affects over half the world's working population, yet we know remarkably little about the role of wages in transitioning toward sustainable livelihood. We develop and test a model whereby as pay approaches a living wage range, pay fairness becomes clearly associated with work-life balance; this in turn links to job satisfaction, which is a four-step process at the psychological level. We further extend this by testing a moderated mediated model, whereby income level is tested as a boundary condition. Using data from N = 873 New Zealand employees, we focus on relatively low-waged employees across three levels of income: up to $20,000, $20-40,000, and $40-60,000, with the last band straddling the New Zealand Living Wage. We find strong support for pay fairness predicting work-life balance and job satisfaction, with work-life balance mediating the relationship toward job satisfaction. In addition, we find direct effects from income to work-life balance, although not job satisfaction. Furthermore, two-way moderation is supported toward work-life balance and job satisfaction, with higher income employees reporting higher outcomes when fairness is high. The index of moderated mediation is also significantly supporting, indicating that work-life balance has a stronger mediation effect as income rises. Thus, as workers emerged from working poverty, pay fairness, and in turn work-life balance, became psychologically more salient for happiness at work, implying that a pathway to Sustainable Development Goal 8 includes at least three psychological steps, in addition to the pecuniary issue of pay: fairness, work-life balance, and job satisfaction.

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Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 62%

Section: Pay Fairnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Income Level As a Moderatormentioning

confidence: 99%

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Escape from Working Poverty: Steps toward Sustainable Livelihood

et al. 2018

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“…In addition, at a community level, households are diverse, which may render "real" or impactful living wage values variable rather than fixed [10]. Thus, without knowing the relationship between different wage values (x) and quality of work life (y), critics and doubtful employers continue to argue that the value should and could be higher or lower, between continuous and dotted blue lines in [25]. This closeness may indicate robustness in the PPP$ figure [25].…”

Section: Journal Of Sustainability Research 4 Of 19mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2019

J Sustain Res

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Living 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.

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“…Indeed, it is the personal stories of what it is like to exist without a living wage-their 'audacity' in demanding a doubling of US federal minimum wages-that produces meaningful change. The stories of individuals and communities living below a living wage can be found in Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, but there is also a horn o' plenty within journals sitting at the periphery of 'medicine' [242][243][244][245]. The jargonistic term, semi-structured interview, belies the profound stories collated under its technique-narratives of distress in the ecological theatre [246,247].…”

Section: Redefining the Narrativementioning

confidence: 99%

Narrative Medicine Meets Planetary Health: Mindsets Matter in the Anthropocene

Prescott

Logan²

2019

Challenges

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The emerging concept of planetary health—defined as the interdependent vitality of all natural and anthropogenic ecosystems (social, political, and otherwise)—emphasizes that the health of human civilization is intricately connected to the health of natural systems within the Earth’s biosphere. In the clinical setting, narrative medicine underscores the importance of absorbing, reflecting upon, and responding to the narratives—the stories—conveyed by patients. Education and interventions using the tenets of narrative medicine have demonstrated value to both patient and provider. Given the grand interconnected challenges of our time—compounded by misinformation and quasi-scientific narratives propagated by the ideology of neoliberalism—we argue that the principles and practice of narrative medicine can be applied on a larger scale, one with planetary health in mind. The role of beliefs, expectations, and agency—mindsets—in the link between narrative and planetary health are emphasized. We use a story of our own to demonstrate that the biological buffering capacity in response to a fast-food meal does not sit on a level socioeconomic playing field. Patient, community, and global health narratives are melding with powerful narratives set by commercial entities. The success of planetary health as a new concept will be strengthened by attention to the ways in which storytelling can influence positive change. No less important is an understanding of the ways in which stories contribute to what ails person, place, and planet.

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How can wages sustain a living? By getting ahead of the curve

Cited by 75 publications

References 42 publications

Escape from Working Poverty: Steps toward Sustainable Livelihood

Escape from Working Poverty: Steps toward Sustainable Livelihood

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

Narrative Medicine Meets Planetary Health: Mindsets Matter in the Anthropocene

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