Living wage ‘a matter of fairness’
Even a vocational education charity should be paying its employees living wage rates once they’ve transitioned from learning to earning, Koha Kai founder and chief executive Janice Lee believes.
The organisation, an education and training service for people with disabilities, provides healthy lunches for schools and operates a commercial catering service.
It is both a registered charity and a living wage employer.
Since September the living wage now stands at $23.05 an hour, ahead of the minimum wage, $21.20.
It’s assessed as the hourly wage a worker needs to pay for the necessities of life and participate as an active citizen in the community.
‘‘Nobody told us we had to do it,’’ Lee said.
But living wage payments were a matter of fairness.
‘‘If you’re generating income for your business by using the time, the efforts and the skills of people employed by you, you should be writing in your business plan an ability to pay all people employed by you a living wage.’’
Koha Kai was an organisation of two halves, Lee said.
Half was about teaching people who had disabilities ranging from the neurodiverse, physically impaired, intellectually disabled, or those with ‘‘any disability which marginalises isolates or creates inequity for them’’.
Once they had grown the skills and capacity for gainful employment, and transitioned to the social enterprise side of the organisation, they were generating income.
‘‘That’s income that allows us to offer our teaching programme to people free of charge – every dollar we make goes back into our charity to provide learning opportunities for people.’’
Although Covid had put the learning programme into stasis, time was being used to develop more social enterprise activity.
‘‘Our long-term goal is to be completely independent ... rather than constantly holding our hand out, we want to be self-sustaining.’’
Koha Kai has moved to Gala St after its previous base at Elmwood Gardens was needed for the ILT’s Enrich training programme.
Lee agreed that Elmwood was the perfect base for that programme – and said Koha could not have transitioned to 25-28 Gala St without the support of a Rio Tinto grant.
Its new site was formerly that of a bakery and the Disabilities Resource Centre.