A strange paradox – can NZ workers really be happy with this crap?

by Phil Duncan

The latest Morgan Research findings on workers’ job satisfaction, published yesterday, found that 77% of New Zealand workers are satisfied or very satisfied in their jobs.  51% rated their pay as good.  According to this research people’s job satisfaction seemed more closely related to being praised for their work than getting pay rises.  The research covered 7,620 New Zealanders 14 years and older.

Yet on December 4, a NZ Herald on-line poll, involving 13,700 respondents, indicated that 57% had received either no pay rise or had their pay cut over the previous 12 months.  34% indicated their pay had risen a little bit and just 9% that it had risen markedly.

Isn’t there a big contradiction here?  Stagnant and falling pay for 57% of workers in one poll while research on a much smaller sample suggests 77% are happy in their jobs.

There are several possible, and possibly overlapping, explanations for this.

Heading across the ditch is an option that people dissatisfied with jobs and pay have.  And, in the past two years alone, about 96,000 people have left New Zealand for Australia.  That’s a big bundle of dissatisfaction solved by emigration.  (And, of course, thousands of other New Zealanders migrated elsewhere.)

Another is that the Morgan Research included people as young as 14, whereas teenagers are a lot less likely to have responded on-line to a Herald poll.  Moreover, almost any first job carries a honeymoon period, some exciting sense of being an important part of a larger entity with a new social circle.  And, for many teenagers, especially if they’re still at school, pay may be low by adult standards but it is either mostly or all discretionary spending.  So if the survey starts at 14, you are getting a proportion of children encountering a fun new experience, providing more discretionary spending money than they’ve ever had.

A third explanation could be that workers’ horizons have been so successfully lowered over the last couple of decades that simply having a job and enough pay to just about manage to make ends meet is regarded positively.  Especially when unemployment and underemployment remain rife.

The current historically low levels of industrial action and union density would tend to back this up.  Even the comparatively high level of workplace accidents and deaths (compared to, say, Australia and Britain) don’t rouse much ire from workers.

My guess is also that when confronted by researchers many employees don’t want to look foolish by admitting they have stuck with jobs they aren’t happy in, so tend to say they’re happier than they are.

While I wish Morgan Research got out a bit more – I work in a very large workplace where hardly anyone is happy – I think their findings are the result of a combination of the four factors listed above.  The most serious of these is workers’ lowered expectations and horizons.  As long as the capitalist ideology of “This is as good as it gets – and there is no alternative” – prevails, workers are likely to continue to just settle.

A new culture of raised expectations is urgently required.  But here we’re in a chicken and egg situation.  For workers to develop higher horizons, there has to be a certain level of struggle develop.  But how can such struggle develop if workers don’t lift their expectations, if they continue to just settle for the crap that is, rather than believe they should – and can! – have better?