Making ends meet somewhere in the middle
What’s average? Something to aspire to or to avoid at all costs? It’s a philosophical or even a moral debate, relative to personal goals and aspirations, depending on what areas of human activity we are talking about.
Books read in a year? Countries visited in a lifetime? Sexual partners? When it comes to income levels most of us would see merit in keeping up with the Joneses.
Better to earn close to or above the median than to languish in the lower percentiles. In Waikato, this means $1055 a week. It’s about $53 more than the national average.
Pity the median wage earner in Gisborne who has to struggle by on a mere $940 every seven days.
If you find these figures depressing, it’s likely you are one of the 40 per cent of New Zealanders in fulltime work who rejoice in minimum wage employment.
The median wage is $52,100 per annum, the minimum $34,320. The maximum? Well, let’s just say that the chief executives of our top 50 companies averaged $1,755,352 in the 2017-18 financial year.
That period’s prime alpha male, outgoing Fonterra head honcho Theo Spierings, pocketed
$8.08 million. A remarkable achievement considering his company lost $196m during his last 12 months in charge.
Fervent believers in the egalitarian society could well feel undermined by such numbers.
Potentially, they feed jealousies about Australia as well.
An average Ocker wage slave, in New Zealand currency, earns $87,168. That’s quite a differential, even if we temper it with context.
What’s their cost of living like and how can they live with the shame of a sandpaper-enhanced bowling attack?
There is a $9200 difference between what the median New Zealand woman earns and her male equivalent. This is the justly maligned ‘‘pay gap’’, a consequence, I suspect, of women being disproportionately employed in areas that are traditionally – and often immorally – underpaid.
The average pay rate for a rest home or aged care worker is $16.29 an hour. Spierings earned $3884.61 an hour.
Inevitably, one compares one’s own situation against that of others. Concepts such as ‘‘minimum wage’’ have little relevance when you work for yourself, still less when you do so in a dying, labour of love industry.
If we follow Marx in equating low wages to exploitation, the overly educated who put up with such remuneration, as much as from themselves as from others, could be thought complicit in the process. If you earn $18,500 a year, you’ve only got yourself to blame. The comparisons get worse if you factor in qualifications.
According to one online source, the lowest amount earned by a Waikato University graduate is $37,322. The starting salary for folk with a PHD or its equivalent is $58,884. I am forty grand off the mark. Woe, always me.
A consequence of inequalities in income streams is an inability of one strata of society to understand the viewpoint of another. How could Spierings possibly relate to the trials and tribulations of a rest home worker? I had a wee taste of this over the holidays. Some kind of administrative error meant I didn’t get paid for seven weeks. Not just any old seven weeks, either: the most expensive time of the year, that of present-buying and neverending revelry.
Christmas feasting gave way to two-minute noodles and fish’n’chips. Rent was paid late and the power company wanted its pound of flesh.
Attempts to rectify the situation were unsuccessful. Emails fell on deaf or holidaying ears.
This wasn’t necessarily the pay staff’s fault. As salaried individuals, on slightly more than $18,500 a year, they had no idea of what it’s like to do without your wages for a month and a half.
Lest the violin strings play too loud, I should acknowledge a wife who is above average in all respects. We were never going to starve. It would be tasteless to compare our situation to those in genuine need. Still, it was an experience closer to the 40 per cent at the bottom than that of the happy median.
* Richard Swainson is a Stuff columnist based in Waikato.