Essential but broke
How do we put a value on work?
Why are so many of the country’s essential workers stuck on the bottom of the wage ladder?
Nikki Macdonald examines how we value work, and how we’ve reached the point where hospital security guards earn 15 times less than the boss.
On a good night, it’s just insults. Drunk or drugged people hurling verbal grenades – the n-word, ‘‘spear-chucker’’, a threat to kill your wife or kids.
On a bad night, it’s the glint of razors or knives coming at you. Wondering how to stop them hurting hospital staff, themselves and you. In that order.
Wondering if this is the night you become another security guard assault statistic.
And all for the princely sum of $19.20 an hour – 30c more than the minimum wage.
Barry* has spent his nights standing guard at a hospital emergency department for 11 years. Twelve sunless hours of risk – angry drunks, a 9-year-old looking for an out, an 83-year-old who has lost everyone and wants to lose herself too.
The suicide-watch patient heaps abuse on abuse – hoping Barry will snap and finish what they started. But the wise head of a 61-year-old former Ma¯ ori Warden understands the line between hurt and anger, and lets the barbs fall unanswered.
But the problem isn’t the job. It’s the most fulfilling work Barry has ever done.
‘‘I love it because, OK, we’re going to get abused. But at the same time, there’s nothing better than the thrill of talking down somebody who is literally going to try and kill themselves right in front of you . . . I went to work and saved somebody’s life – so there’s the buzz.’’
The problem is the money. Like many jobs recognised as essential during the Covid-19 lockdown, hospital security guards are mining the dregs of the wage barrel.
With four 36-hour weeks followed by four weeks of 48 hours, guards spend a month digging a debt hole, then spend the next month trying to climb out, Barry says.
In a 48-hour week, after rent and bills, he has $120 left over a week for food and fuel. Any emergency puts him in ‘‘big trouble’’. A new pair of shoes takes 3-4 weeks of saving.
‘‘The wages are crap but the work is very, very essential. If you were looking at the dollar mark, you would never do security.’’
And when you get hurt and end up on ACC for 6-18 months – as every guard fears they will – you get 80 per cent of those wages.
Barry tells young ones to become cops instead – the skills are similar but the wages are about 50 per cent better.
‘‘All security guards would like is a decent wage. So they can survive.’’
The hollowing out
In 1950, a beef boner at the freezing works earned about the same as an accountant. In 1968, everyone from sheep farmers to MPs to builders, clerks and wharfies earned between one and two times the earnings survey average.
Today, many of the wages at the bottom of that scale are similar. But the top end – judges, bosses of government departments – have rocketed ahead.
In 1968, the Commissioner of Works earned 4.4 times the survey average. In 2018-19, the head of the New Zealand Transport Agency earned about 10 times the average. The highest-paid public servant – Superannuation Fund boss Matt Whineray – earned 16 times as much.
Economists call it a hollowing out – a ravine that has eroded between New Zealand’s best and worst paid.
You can see it even within organisations. At the Ministry of Social Development, the 10 bestpaid jobs are almost all managers. The finance manager earns more than twice as much as welfare workers, who include the Work and Income case managers helping the 200,000 stressed Kiwis stung by unemployment.
At Auckland District Health Board, the chief executive earns almost 15 times as much as those essential frontline workers who pulled on masks and courage to front a fearful public during lockdown – cleaners, orderlies and, at the very bottom, security guards.
At Oranga Tamariki, the department’s 10 deputy chief executives earn more than three times as much as the social workers carrying the extraordinary responsibility of protecting the nation’s children.
The boss earns 11 times as much as the youth workers who shepherd some of New Zealand’s most difficult teens.
So how did we get here?
50 years of change
Jason Whaitiri’s mum was a freezing worker and his dad a meat inspector.
All his brothers and sisters have been through the works.
His first job was at Whakatu¯ in ’83 – a lucrative school holiday job for a fit 16-year-old. Then, Hawke’s Bay was a hub of industry, with the Whakatu¯ and Tomoana works, and the Wattie’s factory going great guns. If you wanted a job, there was always one to be had.
After finishing school, Whaitiri wanted to study, but his mum told him to get a job. So he had interviews at Post Bank and the Ma¯ ori Affairs ministry, which paid something like $200 a week.
‘‘Then you go and ask your mum: ‘Well, how much do you make?’ I think it was about $600 or $700, so it was a no-brainer for me.’’
Now 52, Whaitiri works as a beef boner at Silver Fern Farms. He leaves home about 5.10am to sharpen his knives before a 6am start. He worked through lockdown, worrying he might bring the virus home.
In the old days, it was knife, apron and paper hat, and away you go. Today it’s hard hat, glasses, mesh-apron and arm-guards, gloves and whites. ‘‘You almost look like a knight in shining armour,’’ he laughs.
It’s physical and blood-soaked, but you can make a decent living – $1300-$1400 a week.
‘‘It’s mundane, you’re doing the same thing day in, day out. But we are paid, I believe, pretty good money now. You’ve got to appreciate having a job.’’
Still, he doesn’t want his kids making a third generation of freezing workers. His son does work for Auckland airport and the city council, one daughter is studying law and politics, and his youngest is still at high school.
‘‘My wife came out of the works to go into real estate a couple of years ago. We don’t want our kids to go in there. We want them to have careers.’’
Freezing workers are among the last vestige of the well-paid, semiskilled manufacturing jobs that went overseas as trade barriers disappeared.
In his book
Zealand Crisis, Max Rashbrooke argues they’ve been replaced by low-paid service jobs.
‘‘The resulting ‘hollowing out’ of the workforce has led to a polarisation between well-educated and well-paid workers at the top, and poorly educated and poorly paid workers in the lower levels,’’ he writes.
But to understand how we’ve got here, you have to go back still further. Work has never been paid according to its value to society. Wages used to be set by the award system, with unions and employer associations nutting out a fair wage, which was then approved by the arbitration tribunal.
Former Council of Trade Unions economist Bill Rosenberg says those deals factored in skill levels, contribution to the economy, overtime, and dirt and danger money for unpleasant jobs. Lowerranked jobs such as clerks were linked to more prestigious occupations, such as engineering, so when they got a raise, the clerks would follow.
In 1936, the first Labour government fixed a minimum award wage for men, based on what was considered sufficient to provide for a wife and three children.
But the introduction of the Employment Contracts Act in 1991 destroyed the award system, halved union membership and eroded special allowances.