Wellington City Council has just voted to support the Living Wage ‘in principle’, put $250,000 in the budget to research and implement it, and – crucially – has extended it to cover contractors not just in-house staff.

It’s a great moment: not 100% of the way, since they haven’t put aside all the money needed, and there are some more hurdles to clear, but a huge step.

The council voted unanimously to get officers to prepare a report, by November, on the Living Wage and what it would mean – and they could easily have stopped there.

But 10 out of the 15 also voted to support it in principle – even before officers report back – and to put the money aside for it.

The 10 who supported it were: Celia Wade-Brown, Ray Ahipene-Mercer, Stephanie Cook, Paul Eagle, Leonie Gill, Justin Lester, Bryan Pepperell, Helene Ritchie, Iona Pannett, and John Morrison.

Those who didn’t were Ngaire Best, Jo Coughlan, Andy Foster, Simon Marsh, and Ian McKinnon.

It’s worth noting that Morrison supported it, since he’s the principal challenger to Wade-Brown in this year’s mayoral elections, so it bodes well for the Living Wage surviving past October, whoever wins the election.

Of those who opposed it, Ngaire Best is understood not to be running again, although that’s not confirmed.

Paying contractors the Living Wage is a massive step, because it would have been so easy to stop at in-house staff. Shows the principle is getting through.

Also significant that a plan to limit the Living Wage to those with 4000 hours already at WCC was dropped. That would have given other councils a major ‘out’: they could have also taken half-hearted steps. Now the trail is clearly blazed, and one can only hope that others (esp Auckland) will follow suit.

Anyway the bottom line is a big win for equality and fairer pay all round.

Great news: Wellington City councillors have voted unanimously for a report on the Living Wage to be prepared, as follows:

“to inform the annual plan deliberations on a proposed Council commitment to support a Living Wage. The report should advise on the following key points:

·       Whether Wellington city council should support the principle of a Living Wage for Wellington

·       The costs and benefits of Council moving to a living Wage for all directly employed and contracted staff, and possible options for a staged implementation plan

·       The most appropriate roles for Council to play to support an encourage Wellington businesses citywide to become Living Wage employers.”

It seems like a majority of councillors back not just the report but also the bigger step of actually implementing the Living Wage, so fingers crossed…

Today the campaign for a Living Wage – an $18.40 an hour pay rate for hard-working New Zealanders – took another big step forward with an amazing presentation to the Wellington City Council.

A huge delegation, one of the biggest the council has seen in a long time, was led by St Andrews on the Terrace minister Margaret Mayman, who urged the council to become New Zealand’s first Living Wage council.

“We love living in this beautiful and vibrant city, and we want everybody to be able to participate fully in everything that Wellington to offer its citizens,” she said.

Many council staff – “your people” – earned little more than the minimum wage, Mayman said.

To tackle that, the council was urged to: take the lead in making Wellington a Living Wage city; work with the Living Wage movement to provide an implementation plan to ensure all staff, whether directly employed or by contractors, get the Living Wage; and support local businesses to become Living Wage employers.

Councillors will vote this afternoon on whether to accept the above ideas.

Phil Jones from Thames Publications added his support. “I believe that if we don’t pay our society the wages they need to live, we are in strife,” he said. Thanks to having better paid and trained staff, his firm had low turnover, and more money circulating in society was good for business in general.

Maliki Rahman, a WCC contract cleaner on $13.85 an hour, said: “It’s a struggle to keep up with living costs, to provide healthy food, decent clothes, and coming into winder, the bills are going up.” To give its staff “a better and decent life”, he urged the council to adopt the Living Wage.

Finally, Justine McDonald, the principal of Kelburn Normal School, said teachers were constantly seeing children affected by poverty, and it stopped the school from providing “a starting platform for all children”. Children were coming to school hungry or not properly clotherd because their parents didn’t earn enough to make ends meet.

The school helped cover some costs, but parents “don’t like having the hand-outs” and would rather earn the money themselves, she said.

In conclusion, Mayman referred to remarks by John Key that Wellington was “a dying city”, and said, “Not only is Wellington a living city, but I think we can look forward to Wellington soon being a Living Wage city.”

The Living Wage campaign launch in Wellington a few weeks ago was a powerful lesson in the way that equal opportunities and equal incomes are inextricably linked.

The highlight of the launch was a speech from Sosefina Masoe, a cleaner. Sosofina, who featured in this Dominion Post story, told how she and her husband are struggling to get by on near-minimum wages: $13.85 an hour for “hard, dirty” work cleaning the Police College.

She and her husband are looking after four grandchildren so that the children’s parents can study “to get ahead in life”. But they don’t earn enough to feed those grandchildren properly, or, sometimes, even keep the fridge running. Bills are mounting up every day.

What’s especially powerful about the Sosefina’s story is that, even if some respondents to the Dominion Post story questioned whether there should be so many children in the family, and asked how much money was sent back to Samoa, in all other respects the Masoes are following the American – or even Kiwi – Dream template.

They are working incredibly hard – including 12-hour stints on Sundays – and have very few if any luxuries. “We never go for a movie – or a holiday,” Sosefina said at the campaign launch.

Above all, they are intensely ambitious for their children. Sosefina and her husband recognise that they themselves are unlikely to change jobs, because they can’t afford to take the time out from working to study: “My husband and I talk about how we could do something different, but we are stuck in cleaning jobs on low pay.”

But they are giving up their own happiness so that their children can get better jobs. “I care for my four grandchildren because I told their parents to study [in order] to make a better life.”

If they earned a living wage, that money would, Sosefina said, go into paying for their children’s education, or to basics, like better food so that their children and grandchildren won’t get sick.

The point here is that the Masoes believe firmly in equality of opportunity, in trying to get ahead, in moving up the ladder – but those very opportunities are being severely impeded, to say the least, by an inequality of outcome, in this case, low pay.

When people are earning less than enough to live well on, they can’t take advantage of the opportunities that theoretically exist – not without an extraordinary, and probably damaging, sacrifice.

So even if the only thing that you care about is creating more opportunities, you can’t ignore the need for better, and fairer, pay.