Life has got harder in the past few years for Auckland woman Rose Kavapalu.
An essential worker during the Covid lockdown, she was singled out by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern for praise as she helped keep the Ōtāhuhu police station going, working 13-hour days as a cleaner.
Further lockdowns meant a loss of work, and when work returned her hours were cut. She was forced to take on a patchwork of jobs, five hours here, two hours there, spending hours and petrol money driving between workplaces.
Eventually only working four hours a day, no longer able to afford the place they rented, she and her husband were forced to move in with her parents. As a working woman with four adult children, she couldn’t believe she had reached that point.
READ MORE:
* Young Auckland Pacific women took a big Covid work hit, report shows
* Big part of ethnic pay gap unexplained, raises questions of racism
* Employers struggling to fill jobs but are sector’s poor pay and conditions to blame?
Despite working 65 hours a week, Kavapalu’s dream of owning a house she can share with her family are gone.
“The experience, it’s just terrible,” she said.
“You think that you’re working long hours, that will fix it – no. Because the costs won’t stop.”
She leaves before dawn to start work at Auckland Airport at 6am. She finishes at 3pm then goes to her job cleaning the Otāhuhu police station from 4pm until 9pm. She finally gets in the door about 10pm.
She has been a cleaner for 17 years on the minimum wage. She had never been offered training, she said, and there was no way to progress in the job.
“It’s almost like the working poor, you keep on working. I love to work, I don’t like handouts, but it’s just, you’re going nowhere.”
Stats NZ’s figures out this week showed workers got their biggest annual pay rise in 20 years, with the median weekly earnings from salary and wages up 8.8%. Median hourly earnings from wages and salaries were $29.66 for the year to the June quarter.
Kavapalu says her hours at the cleaning job had halved, but the workload hasn’t. She has been getting the living wage of $22.75 an hour at the Ōtāhuhu job since July 1, and at her other job since last year.
A 65-hour week on the living wage adds up to $1478 a week, or $76,895 a year before tax. The average rent in Auckland is $622 a week, or $32,344 a year.
When wages go up, so do costs, Kavapalu said. In fact, it is harder now to get by than it was five years ago, when she was still putting her children through school.
“You’re willing to work, but it’s just like you’re not moving from one step to above, it’s like you’re going down and down.”
Kavapalu is a member of the union E tū, and has campaigned for Fair Pay Agreements which she believes will help stop a race to the bottom, helping reverse low wages and insecure work.
Contractors tried to undercut competitors’ bids, she said, regardless of workers’ health and safety.
“We are not an object or a vacuum cleaner or whatever, we are human beings you know. We have the right to be treated fairly.
“It’s us as workers who are the ones they are hurting.”
Matt Roskruge (Te Atiawa, Ngāti Tama), associate professor in economics at Massey University, said insecure work could be hugely harmful in terms of personal and career development, and it was often younger people, and people from working class backgrounds who found themselves in that situation.
“How do you look at financing a house or building a family or anything like that when you are struggling to piece together full time employment?” he said.
People might choose to work a second job, for example to save the deposit for a house, which was fine. But that was different to being pushed into multiple jobs because of the rising cost of living, or an inability to find secure or well-paying work.
Covid uncertainty was also putting pressure on employers, making some reluctant or unable to offer guaranteed hours or permanent positions.
“We’re not there yet in terms of the new normal, and employers don’t know what that looks like.”
AUT director at the New Zealand Work Research Institute, Professor Gail Pacheco, said the rising cost of living is one of the things pushing people to work more than one job.
Stats NZ data showed that about 7% of all employed individuals had multiple jobs. Pacheco said previous research using tax data showed people on low pay were much more likely to have more than one employer.
“It is probably quite a range of things that would need to happen. External forces and the cost of living situation makes things difficult, but there’s no nice easy answer,” she said.
Pacheco was also a commissioner at the Productivity Commission, and said its Future of Work inquiry did not find a lot of evidence that precarious work was on the rise, although it depended on the definition.
There has been an increase in self-employment since Covid hit, but not enough information to show how many people wanted to be self-employed.
“One person might say, oh, that’s an increase in entrepreneurial activity. Another person might say, oh, that’s an increase in work that’s not permanent and less reliable.”
The commission called for better data on work outside the traditional employer model, and why people wanted more work.
Tax consultant Terry Baucher said low income families were penalised because the minimum wage was above the abatement level for Working for Families payments.
Someone working on the minimum wage of $21.20 an hour would receive $44,096 a year. The household income threshold at which the Family Tax Credit starts to be clawed back is $42,701.
“Governments have been incredibly cynical and been allowed to get away with not adjusting thresholds for inflation,” he said.
“And to be quite frank, it’s come back and bit them all very hard on the arse. It’s something I’ve been saying for some time, and they’ve just got away with being cynical about it.
“And now, both [political] parties have placed themselves in a position where adjusting the thresholds for inflation is something they should do, but is expansionary from an inflationary perspective. So that should never have been allowed to happen.”
Auckland hospo worker Shastry, 32, was working four jobs at a time, but that’s just changed – he recently signed up for a fifth.
The cost of living, his negative experiences with some employers, and a need for flexibility drove his growing portfolio of work.
Shastry finished a masters in health IT in 2019 and, unable to find work in his field, started working in 2020 in hospitality. He also does unpaid work on projects using his qualifications.
He started out with one employer, but after an issue over the wage subsidy in 2021 he wanted a plan B and a plan C and began work for multiple employers.
He works on the minimum wage at cafes and restaurants, mostly dishwashing and back of house, he said.
He has a formal employment contract with each employer, and works seven days a week, up to 70 hours, at the minimum wage.
The flexibility suits him, but it’s a lot of hours, and is not good socially.
“The loneliness factor is quite underrated for people who work multiple jobs, and I see my social life being affected.”
Through his association with the Raise the Bar union he thought it was fairly common for people in the industry to work more than one job.
“Things are getting very expensive. The cost of living is rising, so you can’t be really working just part-time jobs and living off your part-time job. That’s not how things seem to work, unfortunately.”
Working too many hours to make ends meet is hard, but on the flip-side, many people would like the option to work more hours and can’t.
Equal Employment Opportunities commissioner Karanina Sumeo said it could be easier for people working from home to work for more than one employer than it was for someone at a supermarket or factory.
Working at home or in an office also tended to be safer, and less physically taxing.
“Or you’ve got families who, one [parent] comes home and the other one then has to leave, because one stays home with the kids. And I know that that happens certainly in our Pacific families.
“You’ve still got people who start at two in the morning.”
She wanted to see work valued in terms of its importance to society, and it was time to look at how adequate the social buffer was for some people.
“If you’ve got children, it’s the children who miss out when they never get to see enough of their parents or their caregivers.”
Obviously a job and an income is important to most people’s wellbeing, but there is also more to life than working every hour, she said.
“Ideally, we don’t want people to be working multiple jobs. It’s not a life that anybody wants.
“Of course, if you’re single, and you’re OK with lots of other flexibility, and you want to do that, that’s great. But I would suspect that for the majority of people who have to work multiple jobs it is out of necessity.”
© 2022 Stuff Limited