scholarly journals Minimum Wage Workers in New Zealand: Who are they?

Author(s):  
Jason Timmins

The New Zealand minimum wage rate has recently experienced a sustained period of growth that looks set to continue under the current Labour-led government. Since 2002 the adult minimum wage rate has increased by 28% from $8 and hour to the current rate of $10.25. This rise in the minimum wage has outstripped average wages, which increased by 15% over the same period. This paper uses the New Zealand Household Labour Force Survey and its Income Supplement to identify minimum wage workers and describe their demographic and job characteristics. In particular, the paper examines changes in the characteristics of minimum wage workers between 2002 and 2005. Minimum wage workers, over this period, are relatively young (over a half are aged 16-25 years), predominantly female, working part-time and are likely to be employed in a Services and Sales related occupation and in the Retail and Hospitality industries. Between 2002 and 2005 there was a three-fold increase in the share of wage and salary workers identified as minimum wage workers. Minimum wage workers in 2005 were slightly older and more likely to be female, compared with 2002. In particular, the share of married females among minimum wage workers doubled and there was an increase in the share of minimum wage workers in the Health and Community Services industry sector.

Author(s):  
Jason Timmins

The New Zealand minimum wage rate has recently experienced a sustained period of growth that looks set to continue under the current Labour-led government. Since 2002 the adult minimum wage rate has increased by 28% from $8 and hour to the current rate of $10.25. This rise in the minimum wage has outstripped average wages, which increased by 15% over the same period. This paper uses the New Zealand Household Labour Force Survey and its Income Supplement to identify minimum wage workers and describe their demographic and job characteristics. In particular, the paper examines changes in the characteristics of minimum wage workers between 2002 and 2005. Minimum wage workers, over this period, are relatively young (over a half are aged 16-25 years), predominantly female, working part-time and are likely to be employed in a Services and Sales related occupation and in the Retail and Hospitality industries. Between 2002 and 2005 there was a three-fold increase in the share of wage and salary workers identified as minimum wage workers. Minimum wage workers in 2005 were slightly older and more likely to be female, compared with 2002. In particular, the share of married females among minimum wage workers doubled and there was an increase in the share of minimum wage workers in the Health and Community Services industry sector.


Author(s):  
Jinyi Shao ◽  
Mallika Kelkar

Self-employment in New Zealand has been trending up in the past two years, following subdued growth between 2000 and 2010. Self-employed people made up 11.3% of total employed in the year to March 2012 (251,800 workers), compared with 10.1% in the year to March 2010. Self-employment is defined in this paper as those people operating their own business without employees. The paper explores time series trends in self-employment, in particular across three post-recession periods. Characteristics of self-employed workers are also identified. This paper also investigates movements in and out of self-employment in order to understand the recent growth in this type of employment. The analysis uses longitudinal Household Labour Force Survey (HLFS) data. The HLFS provides official measures of a range of labour market indicators, including the number of people employed, unemployed and not in the labour force.


Author(s):  
Judith Archibald

Many social scientists are familiar with the Household Economic Survey as a source of income data. However it is not the only source. The NZ Income Survey is run annually as a supplement to the June quarter Household Labour Force Survey. It provides a rich set of income data based on a much larger sample size. In this paper I will discuss the NZ Income Survey and compare it to some of the other SNZ sources of income data.


Author(s):  
Michelle Barnes ◽  
Sharon Boyd ◽  
Sophie Flynn

Work arrangements in New Zealand have changed substantially in the last 30 years, leading to increased diversity in contracting arrangements, hours and times worked, and terms and conditions of employment. This paper describes the current work arrangements, employment conditions and job satisfaction levels of employed people in New Zealander from data collected in the Survey of Working Life. The survey was run as a supplement to the Household Labour Force Survey in the March 2008 quarter, to answer questions such as: 'How prevalent is casual work in New Zealand?', 'How many employed people work non-standard hours?’ and 'Who is most likely to experience stress or discrimination at work?’ The focus o f the data analysis is to identify workers with different types of employment relationships (for example, temporary versus permanent employees), and describe the demographic and job characteristics associated with these different employment relationships. Working-time patterns and conditions of employment are the other key topics examined in this paper. It is intended that this supplement be repeated every three years to monitor changes in employment conditions, work arrangements and job quality in New Zealand.


Author(s):  
Philip Spier

This paper describes the results from an exploratory study examining whether Household Labour Force Survey panel data could be used to provide some insights into the level of occupational mobility in New Zealand. Identifying the extent to which people are leaving the occupation for which they have trained can improve our understanding of the contribution of occupational mobility to skill shortages. Overall, it was found that 7% of individuals in the sample appeared to change occupation over the course of a one year period. The groups that were found to be most likely to change occupations were young people and unskilled workers.


Author(s):  
Sophie Flynn ◽  
Andrea Fromm

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a preliminary measure of labour underutilisation in New Zealand using data from the Household Labour Force Survey (HLFS). Underutilisation measures add value to the suite of labour market indicators already available from the HLFS. In particular, the underutilisation rate complements the unemployment rate by providing a broader picture of unmet demand for paid employment in New Zealand. The concept of underutilisation and the necessity to measure underutilisation is based on recommendations of an International Labour Organization (ILO) Working Group on Underutilisation made in 2008. The Working Group recommended that ‘... the statistical community should devote serious efforts to introduce, at a par with unemployment, a supplementary concept which measures the employment problem as experienced by individual workers.’ The development of underutilisation measures is also important to mirror changes in increasingly transitional labour markets and to enable analysis and evaluation of these changes.


Author(s):  
David Grimmond

Research on labour market dynamics in New Zealand has been limited mainly due to data limitations. The introduction of the quaterly Houshold Labour Force Survey (HLFS) in December 1985 has greatly increased information on the New Zealand labour market. In this study we propose to test for a relationship between unemployment duration and the ability for individuals to leave unemployment. For example, if the probability of leaving unemployment for a job declines that longer one has already been unemployed, then this could be taken as evidence in support of the Clark and Summers (1979) hypothesis that a concentrated group of persistently unemployed are a large proportion of unemployment. The evidence presented here supports this view, but doubt remains as no allowance is made for other influencing factors.


Author(s):  
Brian Silverstone ◽  
Susi Gorbey

The quarterly change in the number of unemployed New Zealanders is usually quite small relative to the total number of people unemployed. For the year ended September 1994, for example, the absolute average quarterly change in Household Labour Force Survey (HLFS) unemployment was 10,500 people against a quarterly average unemployment pool of 145,000 people. These relatively small stock changes, however, conceal the much larger flows into and out of unemployment of possibly 70,000 people during each quarter of 1993194. The scale of these flows, and the associated probabilities of entering and leaving unemployment, are not widely known. Using data from the HLFS, this paper updates and extends the relatively small amount of New Zealand research on labour market dynamics. It begins with a definition and data on the unemployment stock-flow relationship in New Zealand. This is followed by a brief analysis of the flows between the major labour market states and the associated flow rates and cycles. The paper will indicate how gross flows data can be used to give insights into gender and age differences in unemployment and 'steady-state' outcomes. The accuracy of gross flows data and the formal modelling of unemployment inflows and outflows are on-going projects.


Author(s):  
Simon Hall

The official unemployment rate in New Zealand has been below 5%for nearly six years and reached a 22-year low of 3.4% in late 2007. However, official unemployment statistics understate the availability of labour given they do not include an important group of people who want to work - the marginally attached. These are people who want to work, but are either not available or not actively seeking work and therefore are not classified as unemployed.   But how different are those people that are marginally attached to the labour force compared to the unemployed? Since 1999, strong employment growth has coincided with a large drop in unemployment but the number of people marginally attached to the labour force has fallen only slightly. Using data from the Household Labour Force Survey, this paper tries to explain the reasons behind this by examining trends in those marginally attached to the labour force and whether this group is significantly different to the officially unemployed. While it is sometimes argued that those marginally attached to the labour force should be combined with the officially unemployed to give a measure of excess supply, this paper investigates whether this is sensible given they appear to be two distinct groups.


Author(s):  
James Baines ◽  
James Newell

Labour markets are in a constant state of change, in both scale and composition. Policy analysts and researchers alike have an interest in tracking such changes over time. Statistics New Zealand is the major source of data on labour markets, and various statistical surveys and census keep us updated at varying frequencies, from quarterly to 5-yearly. For policy purposes. frequency and timeliness of monitoring data are important. The Household Labour Force Survey is therefore used as the statistical basis for monitoring various aspects of New Zealand labour markets, including trends in employment and unemployment levels. However, comparison of various statistical data sets reveals substantial differences in estimates as data are disaggregated, or as data refer to less universal (i.e. minority) labour market phenomena. Which data set is likely to be more accurate? Is reduced accuracy a casualty of survey sampling., weighting and estimation procedures?


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