Linking Wage to Well-Being

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Abstract: Humanitarian Work Psychology (HWP) has challenged historical claims that wage and wellbeing are barely connected. Contradicting SDGs 1, 3, 8, and 10, earlier research prioritized middle-class samples (for whom wage was less salient) and assumed linearity (instead of actually curvilinear poverty traps). Nonetheless, even in HWP research, the wage–wellbeing connection has remained modest. Has HWP overlooked a crucial, proximal mediator between wage and wellbeing – Subjective Experience of Work-related Precariousness (SEWP)? Funded by the Health Research Council, in 2022, we surveyed everyday experiences of N = 403 (Study I) and later N = 539 (Study II) lower-income workers nationally across Aotearoa/New Zealand. Participants shared their own wages and other household incomes; ill/well-being (e.g., job dis/satisfaction, work-life im/balance), and the reproductive-material (most directly wage-focused) dimension of SEWP. In Study I, wages connected surprisingly well to wellbeing but only, and nonlinearly, through reproductive-material SEWP: A combination of “own wage” and “other household income” explained 30% of variance in reproductive-material SEWP, which linked, and linearly, to more distal wellbeing, e.g., work–life balance (21%). Such ripple effects from wage via reproductive-material SEWP to wider wellbeing indicate “how” wages advance sustainable livelihoods. By comparison in Study II, which followed an especially steep rise in cost-of-living in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the central tendency was, uniformly, subjective precariousness. This additional surprise finding, we argue, was less indicative of nonreplicability and more sensitive to a widespread working cost-of-living-induced poverty trap. Many of our statistical techniques are geared to find covariation – the antithesis of poverty traps. Future research needs to replicate these findings across samples, measures, and contexts, and be mindful of inbuilt Type II error.