My two cents on Living Wage for African Flower Workers

First if you haven’t read the Report on Living Wage for Kenya with Focus on Fresh Flower Farm area near Lake Naivasha following a research done by Richard Anker and Martha Anker I’d advise you to look for that report and go through it bit by bit .Talking of Living Wage am sure someone would ask what the heck is that?, well to save you the trouble of trying to figure out what it is let me define it for you. living wage is the right to a decent wage for all it is enshrined in the universal Declaration of Human Rights which states that “Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his [her] family an existence worthy of human dignity.” Translating this principle into a practical definition is not straightforward but in general it is accepted that a living wage should include the ability to meet basic needs including shelter, nutrition and clothing, incidental expenditure on health and education and to provide for a discretionary amount to enable workers to save for covering unforeseen costs.In public policy, a living wage is the minimum income necessary for a worker to meet their basic needs. This is not necessarily the same as subsistence, which refers to a biological minimum, though the two terms are commonly confused.

According to Richard Anker and Martha Anker their estimate of a living wage for Kenya flower farms for March 2014 in Lake Naivasha area is KSh17,276 ($201) per month before consideration of taxes and KSh18,542 ($216) after consideration of taxes to get gross pay needed. It is important to point out that the living standard they used to estimate their living wage is decent but basic for Kenya. It is also important to point out that two unusual reasons for the large gap between their living wage and prevailing wages are that real wages of flower farm workers have fallen significantly in recent years and almost all flower farm workers in the Lake Naivasha area live in urban townships near flower farms and this increased their estimate of a living wage compared to what it would have been if workers had lived in a rural area.

The idea of a living wage is that workers and their family should not have to live in poverty. But a living wage should do more than simply keep workers and their families out of poverty. It should also allow them to participate in social and cultural life. In other words, wages should be sufficient to ensure that workers and their families are able to afford a basic life style considered decent by society at its current level of development. Workers should receive a living wage in normal work hours without having to work overtime.

 As someone who has always advocated for the uplifting of the living standards of workers and their families both socially and economically , I’d support any movement that is trying, primarily through local legislation, to bring justice to low wage workers by requiring that businesses which have public contracts pay their workers’ wages sufficient to support their families.

 According to me a living wage is a wage that enables a worker to earn enough to lift him/herself and his/her family out of poverty. A living wage allows a worker to become self-sufficient. But how much must a worker earn in order to be able to lift a family out of poverty and become self-sufficient? The calculation of a living wage depends in large part on how one calculates what poverty is and how much it costs to become self-supporting

Any calculation of a true living wage must recognize what common sense and our government has long recognized, that wages far higher than minimum wage still leave families in need.

If a person works full-time, they should not have to raise their family in poverty. Advocacy for enactment of a living wage is summed up in that simple statement

Work should lift you out of poverty not keep you there