Power to Win: The Living Wage Movement in Aotearoa New Zealand
本书基于作者作为运动核心组织者的亲身经历，详细记录了新西兰生活工资运动从2011年至今的发展历程、关键事件和成功经验，对研究社会运动、劳工权益的学者有参考价值。
In Power to Win, Lyndy McIntyre explores the history of the campaign for the Living Wage in Aotearoa New Zealand, from its beginnings in 2011 to the shape of the movement in the present day. The book benefits from McIntyre's leading role within the campaign across its history and, from 2015, as one of only two paid community organisers for the movement, a role she retired from in 2020 to document its story and its successes in Power to Win. The book benefits greatly from this internal perspective, with McIntyre's experiences as a key member of both the campaign itself across the length of its life to date and more widely within the New Zealand trade union movement for more than 40 years providing her with a wealth of insights to share with readers. The book highlights many of the seminal moments and speeches that helped to establish and shape the Living Wage movement in New Zealand, from its industrial relations origins as an idea initially formed within the Service and Food Workers Union to its intersection with activists keen on incorporating traditional Māori values into their organising of workers, to the formal launch of the campaign in May 2012, and up to the ‘Covid times’ from 2020 onwards. Each chapter is dedicated to a specific year and individual building block of the movement, documenting for instance the circumstances which led to the campaign's success in persuading Wellington City Council to become a ‘Living Wage Council’ in 2013, and the funding in 2015 which allowed them to employ two community organisers to support the work of campaigners across the country. This approach allows the reader to effectively understand the origins and evolution of the movement over time, in particular in the ways in which it consolidated its victories as springboards in ever increasing the ambitions of the campaign. And while the main focus of Power to Win resolutely stays with the people behind the campaign and those who benefit from it, McIntyre also provides a short history of the issue of poverty pay (or ‘in-work poverty’, as it is often referred to in other Western countries) in New Zealand which provided the socioeconomic conditions that in turn gave rise to the country's Living Wage movement. She highlights, in particular, the erosion and dismantling of employment rights and protections through the encroaching corporatisation of public services and market-driven economic policies in the late 1980s as key to the ever-greater establishment of poverty pay across the country, alongside the implementation of the Employment Contracts Act of 1991 which enabled employers to bypass unions and impose lower pay and conditions on individuals and groups of workers with very little opposition. The book explores the ‘new kind of campaign’ which emerged in the light of ever-decreasing wage and employment protections for low-paid workers in New Zealand, which saw an ever-greater emphasis on a community-driven response to these issues over a traditional industrial relations approach, and highlights the international links with other similarly-minded campaigns that helped to shape the country's own Living Wage movement. The Real Living Wage campaign of the United Kingdom is highlighted as a particularly key inspiration for and direct supporter of its New Zealand counterpart since the latter's inception, both in terms of its community-based origins as well as in the practical infrastructure of how it operates. The movement, established in the East End of London in 2001 by the community organisation Citizens UK as a response to parents in the local area having to work multiple jobs to keep up with the cost of living (and the consequences of this on themselves and their families), had by 2011 established a formal accreditation network to hold the employers who had voluntarily committed to paying the Living Wage to account, providing an effective template for their New Zealand counterparts to explore. McIntyre is generous in highlighting the role of the British Living Wage campaign in providing both inspiration and direct developmental support for many of the structures of the Living Wage movement in New Zealand, including, for example, in a replication of the original UK contract between campaigners and employers to hold them to their promises of voluntarily agreeing to pay Living Wage rates of pay. At a wider level, the UK Living Wage Foundation's formal accreditation structure, a publicly facing benchmark which individual organisations must commit to in order to officially call themselves ‘Living Wage Employers’, also helped to shape the development and operational dynamics of the New Zealand movement's own employer accreditation network. She also, however, demonstrates those instances in which the movement has firmly built on the success of other living wage campaigns across the world and taken them to new heights: for example, in establishing a legal trademark for the term ‘Living Wage Employer’ across New Zealand, ‘something that does not exist elsewhere—even in the UK, where thousands of businesses and organisations are accredited’. In this way, McIntyre demonstrates how lessons can both be learned from pre-established campaigns to help form the basis of new movements but also in how these new actors can then in their own ways forge their own paths forward. Power to Win ends on a call to arms to living wage activists across the world that the solution to low pay will not be found through the specifics of one government, but ‘in a different way of organising, using the principles adopted by successful social justice campaigns in Aotearoa and globally’. It is a hopeful note for McIntyre to conclude on: and, given the successes achieved by the New Zealand living wage movement in their 13 years in existence so far, one that is difficult not to share.