Sonya Bateson: Life is hard enough for low-wage workers - and it’s about to get harder

Tauranga's paid parking zone is extending. Photo / George Novak

OPINION

Did you know it’s October now?

No, really. Not a word of a lie. It was August yesterday, then I sneezed and somehow missed September.

And do you know what that means? It’s 78 days until Christmas.

Eleven weekends to go. Yikes.

Those of you who are obsessive organisers like myself have probably already started on your Christmas shopping or, at the very least, have lists ready to go. I estimate I’m about a third of the way there and hope to have it all done by mid-November.

The thought of waiting until December to buy presents literally makes my palms sweat.

Those Christmas shopping crowds are the stuff of nightmares. All that jostling, endless roaming of aisles, manoeuvring of trolleys, waiting in long lines – it’s legal torture.

I’ll do anything I can to avoid that rigamarole.

But as bad as it is to shop during this time, it’s even worse to be a retail or hospitality worker. Trust me, I know. Been there, done that. Zero out of 10, would not recommend it.

It’s not fun earning at or near minimum wage to serve cantankerous customers or ridiculously drunk patrons who forget the person behind the counter is an actual human being with feelings, something that happens often during times of high stress like Christmas.

Now, imagine what it’s like to finish work close to midnight after almost 12 hours standing on your feet dealing with unruly holiday crowds, then having to hike a distance back to your car park.

If you’re a Tauranga CBD worker, you’ve got the choice of parking in a parking building at a cost of up to $17.50 a day, Dive Crescent’s 100ish parks (40 more to come) are $8 per day if you don’t mind a walk or finding a free roadside parking space on the outskirts of the city centre and walking in. An obvious choice for many.

If you were wondering, it’s about 2km from the main shopping streets to Memorial Park where CBD worker Sheila Parker parks – that’s an easy stroll during the day, but quite a hike when you’ve got to do it in the dark after a long day of work.

Neither of those options are particularly appealing to me. And the free option is about to get even harder.

From November, paid parking zones are going to cover an extended area between 4th Ave and Monmouth St in the city centre. In April, those zones will be expanded further, then in September there’ll be time-restricted parking zones right up to 11th Ave.

At $2 per hour for the first two hours and $5 an hour after that, an eight-hour day would cost an eye-watering $34.

I get why the Tauranga City Council wants to do this. Truly, I do. Our reliance on cars as a primary means of transport is, well, not great. And, frankly, the sheer number of cars lining our streets and berms is rather unsightly.

But life is hard enough already for low-wage workers, and these rule changes are going to make it that much harder for them.

And yes, bus or bike travel is another option for some. But biking isn’t for everyone, and buses don’t work for anyone who starts early in the morning (like someone who works in a café) or finishes late in the evening (like someone working a late-night retail job or in a restaurant).

And people working in those jobs are almost always on lower wages.

To get an idea what it would be like to catch a bus for work, I had a look to see the earliest and latest buses available for my suburb, Welcome Bay.

The earliest bus to town arrives in the CBD at 6.55am and the last bus home leaves the city at 8pm. A single Tauranga bus trip for an adult with a Bee Card costs $2.72.

I reckon that’s pretty affordable, especially with petrol prices passing $3 a litre. But those hours certainly aren’t going to suit everyone.

I had a look at the Rotorua bus timetables for my old address in Mangakakahi for comparison’s sake and they’re even shorter than in Tauranga.

The first bus arrives in the city at 7am and the last bus leaves at 6.09pm. An adult Bee Card ticket in Rotorua costs $2.24.

But while the buses may stop much earlier in the evening in Rotorua, the affordability of parking makes up for it. Some on-street inner-city parking is available for workers at 50c an hour but most is $2 per hour (recently up from $1), or there’s a $6 per day option at a parking building.

That’s quite a marked difference between the two cities.

In other good news (heavy sarcasm) for people on low to medium wages, the median weekly rent in August was $680 in Tauranga and $550 in Rotorua, according to Trade Me.

That makes Tauranga the sixth-most expensive district to live in New Zealand, the only location outside of Auckland and Wellington to make that aspirational top-10 list.

Trade Me Property sales director Gavin Lloyd said rental prices were likely to “continue their upward trend over the next year”.

It’s just one thing after another, isn’t it? Our lovely little country is getting harder and harder to live in every day. I’d say many people will be preparing their families for an even leaner Christmas this year than the last.

Maybe those holiday shopping crowds won’t be as boisterous this year. And that’s a sad, sad thought.

Sonya Bateson is a writer, reader and crafter raising her family in Tauranga. She is a Millennial who enjoys eating avocado on toast, drinking lattes and defying stereotypes. As a sceptic, she reserves the right to change her mind when presented with new evidence.