How the Living Wage Movement plans for success and succession

Friday, 1 April 2022

Living Wage Movement stalwart Lyndy McIntyre says her successor in the movement, Marlon Drake, is “a talented young organiser”, and a tall one at that.

Aotearoa’s lowest-paid workers are organising, and saying no to poverty wages. As the Living Wage Movement nears its 10th anniversary, Ethan Te Ora speaks to three of its community organisers, past and present.

Lyndy McIntyre’s successor stands head and shoulders above most people, and that’s what she noticed first.

“You're tall – take this,' she said, foisting a large campaign banner towards him.

It was May 10, 2017, and the Living Wage Movement was running a lunchtime rally at Victoria University’s Kelburn campus. The university didn’t pay its cleaners a living wage – then set at $20.20 an hour – and the Living Wage for Vic coalition was organising to change that.

Marlon Drake, at 6’6” (1.98m), calls door frames “a hazard”. His height, in this instance, became an asset – and, soon, an unmissable red banner hung down over the student hub balcony.

* Our essential workers should all be on a living wage

Community organiser Marlon Drake hung the Living Wage Movement banner in the opening shot of this video. He also talks about the importance of getting a living wage for the university's cleaners.

* Hutt City Council votes to pay staff the living wage

“He certainly had a talent for getting that banner into high places,” McIntyre remembers. “At 5’4”, I didn’t have a show.”

She was a community organiser for the young movement, yet to celebrate its fifth anniversary. And, after 30 years grinding out campaigns while working for trade unions, McIntyre felt the new movement had “cracked a code”. It was a new kind of grassroots movement, organising unions, faith groups, and community organisations around a shared cause: ending poverty wages, tilting the axis of power from employers to low-wage workers.

Marlon Drake says his job, if he does it well, won’t be his for too long.

Drake was then a second-year student, newly elected to the Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association (VUWSA), attending the event in support of the cause.

The movement harnesses collective power; any community member might find a place.

Lyndy McIntyre, right, handed over the reins as community organiser of Wellington's Living Wage Movement to Marlon Drake.

If Drake owned a DSLR camera, he might’ve been recruited to photograph the event. If he was a musician, he might’ve used his connections to rig up a sound system. Or if he knew his way around the marae kitchen, he might’ve helped out with food.

Those values are an enactment of kotahitanga (“we are stronger when we work together”).

Four years later, the campaign succeeded, the cleaners finally winning a commitment from the university to pay them a living wage, then set at $22.75 an hour. It was the culmination of a five-year push, drawing on the collective efforts of thousands of people; the cleaners themselves leading the charge.

By then, Drake and McIntyre’s roles were reversed: Drake, now the community organiser, McIntyre, a supporter of the movement. But, only six months later, Drake would step away from the role himself.

Since stepping down as a community organiser for the Living Wage Movement, McIntyre has been writing a book about its first ten years. She hopes to publish that book later this year.

If that sounds unfortunate – or like dangerously high turnover – Drake says it isn’t so.

“The whole point of being a community organiser is to build leaders, and organise yourself out of a job,” he says. “Find someone else who can take over, and do that constantly, building more leaders, more and more organisers.”

Early life, early wins

McIntyre remembers the conversations that led to the launch of the Living Wage Movement. “The power that was needed was more than simply union power,” she says.

The first time McIntyre experienced community activism was in the mid-1970s.

A group of Aro Valley mothers – including herself – campaigned to get a pre-school for their children. They won. That success was instructive for McIntyre, proof that communities could “stand up for things, and win change” when they worked together.

Felicia Scherrer, of the Living Wage Movement, discusses Dunedin becoming an accredited living wage council. (Video first published September 2019)

Her own childhood in Stokes Valley came to pass at “a time of relative prosperity for Aotearoa”, during the 1950s and 1960s, with a debt of gratitude owed to her own “loving and supportive mother”. She traces her earliest involvement with collective action back to Victoria University, in the early 1970s, when she joined student protests against the Vietnam War and apartheid.

Later, she worked as a compositor for newspapers, becoming a delegate for the Printers’ Union, throughout the 1980s, at a time when computerisation was leading to successive rounds of redundancies for the industry.

Following almost 10 years as a delegate on the shop floor, McIntyre started working for the Northern Hotel and Hospital Workers’ Union, later the Service and Food Workers Union (SFWU), and later still E tū, in 1990.

Its members were among the lowest-paid workers in New Zealand – cleaners, caregivers, security guards and hospitality workers. McIntyre saw “a lot of in-work poverty”, which she had never seen in her early years.

And she arrived on the eve of the Employment Contracts Act (ECA), brought in under the National Government in 1991, which ravaged union membership, setting back the potential for collective action, along with the ability to maintain pay and work conditions.

“It started the great divide – low-paid workers then became the working poor”, she says.

Marlon Drake remembers taking over from Lyndy McIntyre was a tall order. “Everyone knew it, too,” he says.

And, over the next 20 years, unions around the country tried to claw back workers’ power, often through industrial action – with some successes. McIntyre, for her part, worked across “a whole wide range of unions”, before returning to the SFWU in 2011.

Later that year, like-minded people from communities started talking, and the conversations followed a trend.

“The power that was needed was more than simply union power,” McIntyre says. “Union power’s great. There were other groups in the community that cared about poverty and inequality, but we didn’t have a monopoly over that.”

In 2012, the Living Wage Movement publicly launched in Auckland and Wellington, during the months of May and August respectively. Other local networks soon followed – an explosion of collective action.

Marlon Drake credits his success as a community organiser to the leaders around him.

The first Living Wage rate for New Zealand was established in February 2013 – $18.40 an hour – and it has been updated annually ever since. Yesterday the latest rate was announced – $23.65 an hour – and will come into effect from September 1.

Early adoptees were often “small, ethical employers”, among them Wellington employers like Fix & Fogg, Rogue and Vagabond, and Pivotal Print. Those businesses, while welcomed, were never the focus – the movement targeted large corporates and institutions funded by public money.

The wins came slowly, then quickly. The first big corporate – Vector, New Zealand's largest distributor of electricity and gas – came on board in 2017. Then Wellington City Council became the first accredited council in 2018. The first big bank, Westpac New Zealand, followed in 2019, and eventually the entire banking sector came on board.

Around this time, McIntyre began thinking about stepping down as community organiser for Wellington. She planned to write a book about the movement’s first 10 years (which she now hopes to publish later this year).

Jaistone Finau comes from a varied tradition of community organisers.

Her successor was obvious. Someone who had been “playing a leadership role for some years”, a person who she knew could “bring new leaders into the movement”.

‘The size of the shoes were huge’

Marlon Drake says the moment he understood the power of collective action was a shared one.

He was completing a five-day community organiser training when it happened. Decision-makers, he knew, often didn’t listen to people they served, a wilful ignorance which was detrimental to communities. The solution dawned on him that day, as it did for others in the room.

“If you want your community to be included in decisions, the best way is to organise,” he says.

By that stage, he had become more and more involved in the Living Wage Movement – attending events, election forums, hanging more banners. He was active outside the movement, too – being elected VUWSA president in 2018. Then, the following year, he helped to organise friend Tamatha Paul’s Wellington City Council campaign.

Still, when McIntyre asked him to take over as community organiser for Wellington, he was nervous. “The size of the shoes were huge, and everyone knew it, too,” he says.

Community organising is largely relational; the organiser's role is to nurture long-lasting relationships. He knew success would depend on the leaders around him. “It was because of those leaders I was able to do anything,” he says.

Drake’s own community stretches far and wide, from Tāmaki Makaurau to Te Whanganui-a-Tara, and beyond. He credits whānau and friends for instilling in him good values, and names a list of movement mentors too long to publish. (McIntyre runs through a similar list, also too long for publication.)

He grew up in Auckland, spending six years in Kingsland, before his family moved to Pt Chevalier. “You got looked after by your neighbours,” he says of that childhood.

The pull of home, and a new role with Te Ohu Whakawhanaunga, both influenced his departure. Now, he helps to build “a community alliance”, applying a similar model of organising, working towards a campaign around housing.

Drake had spent five years with the movement, and two years as an organiser. He takes most pride in the “people within the movement” who won campaigns, rather than the wins themselves.

The Hutt Valley Living Wage Network, convened by Muriel Tunoho, succeeded in getting the Hutt City Council to become an accredited living wage employer. “People power, watching them speak at the council table, and hold that space,” he says.

It’s a similar story in Porirua where the Porirua Living Wage Network, led in its submission by Hiueni Nuku, Mareta Sinoti and Jaistone Finau, won the living wage for that council’s contracted workers.

Drake appreciated Finau’s “patient urgency”, then a succession plan shaped in his head. It had all started almost three years previously.

An intergenerational continuum of movement work

It was March 14, 2019 – a Thursday – and tertiary students from around Wellington were attending a mental health wānanga, hosted at Tapu Te Ranga Marae. The kaupapa was important, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t time for moments of levity.

Jaistone Finau, then a third-year student, was attending on behalf of the Pasifika Students Council. Drake was beside him that first night, sleeping on the marae floor. The two of them shared “some crack-up yarns”, Drake remembers, laying the groundwork for a long friendship.

That next day the energy in the room irrevocably changed, when news broke of shootings at Al-Noor Mosque and Linwood Mosque in Christchurch.

Finau remembers quiet conversations with Drake throughout the weekend. His nature is to work side by side, but Pākehā often exploited that preference as weakness. That wasn’t the case with Drake; instead he seemed to “offer up the space he occupies”, and they became good friends.

Drake, meanwhile, recognised a new leader.

Finau understood the Living Wage Movement. His parents now led comfortable middle income lives, but that wasn’t always the case. His father had often lain awake, wondering how to make $20 stretch the whole week.

Finau was a born community organiser, too, descended from a proud tradition. His maternal grandfather had once worked with others to build the Tuvaluan community in Porirua. And he served that community loyally, a kind of servant leadership – even shown as physical acts, like mowing the lawns of neighbours.

“I see those lessons, and mash it up with my own version of community organising,” he says.

He was brought into the movement, event by event, and forum by forum. At a certain point, Drake “stitched him up” to address Porirua City Council about what a living wage would mean for the community. By late last year, when Drake left Wellington, Finau felt ready to take over as community organiser for Porirua.

He sees intersections everywhere – a relationship formed at a vax festival might translate into a shared passion for liveable wages, for instance. The multiple places he calls home – Porirua, Samoa, Tokelau, Tuvalu and Kiribati – help him keep an open mind.

“I’m not just from one Pacific country; I am from quite a few,” he says. “It makes me susceptible to looking at other Islanders, seeing how they do things, what works for them.” He applies those lessons in everything he does, not only organising.

Four months into the job, the objective is simple: “build it up and leave”. At 23, his hope is that the next organiser might be even younger. “Marlon left it for me, I’ve just got to build it up even more, and leave it for the next person.”

However, before he goes, one accreditation would resonate more deeply than others. His Nana works part-time as a cleaner, and doesn’t currently make a living wage.

Finau sees that as missed opportunity. “You can’t expect someone to live on that, with the cost of living,” he says.

Cultural attitudes, it would seem, are shifting. Ten years ago, the thought that workers should be paid a living wage was novel to some. If the current trajectory continues, it could soon be untenable to pay them anything less.