FAIR’S FAIR

• Published date: 23 October 2021
• Publication title: Mix, The

Some days, Graeme gets a living wage. Other days, he earns $2 more.

In the world of supermarket workers, he is one of the lucky ones.

Graeme is not his real name. None of the supermarket workers, nor their mums, mentioned in this article were willing to take that risk. That tells a story in itself.

Graeme is in his twenties and has been a supermarket worker for more than five years. He must be doing a good job, because he has been given extra responsibilities. That means, a couple of days a week his pay climbs from a few cents above the living wage, $22.75 an hour, to a few cents above $23 an hour.

And, yes, he agrees, among New Zealand’s 57,000 supermarket workers he is one of the fortunate ones.

‘‘I think it’s because we have a bloody good union behind us,’’ Graeme says.

Most non-unionised supermarkets pay ordinary employees the minimum wage, $20 an hour.

Woolworths New Zealand, which runs Countdown supermarkets, has a collective agreement with First Union to pay no less than $21.78 an hour to checkout operators who have been with the company a year.

Graeme works at a Countdown store, in Otago.

He might be counting his blessings, but it is still a battle to build a life on that income.

To his credit, this year, he and his partner put a 10% deposit on a house.

The deposit was only achieved by saving hard and not leaving home until he bought his own place.

The mortgage payments are met by having a boarder living with them in their two bedroom house.

Graeme is aware of the huge profits being made by New Zealand’s supermarket duopoly, Woolworths NZ and Foodstuffs. Last year, Woolworths NZ supermarkets had a $202million net profit, while Foodstuffs’ North and South Island co-operatives, which run Pak’nSave, New World and Four Square stores, had a combined $407.3million operating profit.

‘‘I’d appreciate them using some of those profits to make everything more comfortable for us workers,’’ Graeme says.

It is not only the tens of thousands of supermarket workers who are noticing the growing gap between wages and profits. For the past three decades, wages throughout the New Zealand economy have lagged behind the value of what workers are producing. A cost-cutting ‘‘race to the bottom’’ has resulted in a low wage economy that is most keenly evident in sectors such as supermarkets, bus driving and forestry but is also widely felt in many other workplaces. Since 1991, across all Kiwi employees, the gap between real wage growth and labour productivity growth has widened to an average of $6.10 an hour.

Another way of getting at the same picture is by looking at the labour share of income — the share of the national income that goes to employees compared with the share that goes to owners of capital, business owners. Since the mid-1970s, the labour share of income has risen in Denmark and declined somewhat in most OECD countries. It has dropped about 15% in New Zealand, by an average of more than...