La Boca Loca makes Wellington better by paying living wage

A couple of months ago, we went along to a din­ner put on by the Sus­tain­able Busi­ness Net­work, which was a very inter­est­ing night but I found myself unable to write about it without seeth­ing with rage remem­ber­ing the man I’d been seated next to. He owns a fran­chise chain, believes that the only reas­on there are hungry kids in New Zea­l­and is because their par­ents choose to buy booze, and he does­n’t believe that sexu­al assault and domest­ic fig­ures are accur­ate (they’re over-repor­ted appar­ently- “well what is sexu­al assault any­way? Is it when a woman just says no?”). He also said that we can­’t pay people more, because then all the jobs would go to Aus­tralia. I can­’t ima­gine driv­ing to Aus­tralia to pick up a bur­ger, so that was a bit of a curi­ous thing to say. How­ever, what made me very very happy was that Mari­anne and Lucas from our beloved Mex­ic­an res­taur­ant La Boca Loca were there, and made a pas­sion­ate argu­ment for pay­ing a liv­ing wage. They’re not just talk­ing the talk how­ever – La Boca Loca has been cer­ti­fied as a liv­ing wage employ­er since July. And guess what? They’re still here.  So I thought it would be good to have a chat with them about what they’re doing.

 1. So, first and fore­most – what is a liv­ing wage?

A liv­ing wage is a wage high enough for a work­er to meed their needs, enjoy their life and par­ti­cip­ate in soci­ety. At the moment, research indic­ates that $18.80 an hour is the level needed for a liv­ing wage in New Zea­l­and.

2. Why has La Boca Loca decided to pay a liv­ing wage, and when did you imple­ment it?

We learned about the Liv­ing Wage earli­er this year and star­ted look­ing into what it was, and why it was set at that level. It seemed pretty clear to us that if we were to live up to our own stand­ards as an eth­ic­al busi­ness we needed to adopt a liv­ing wage. Pay­ing our team enough to live on is core to what eth­ic­al, sus­tain­able and suc­cess­ful busi­ness means to us.

We star­ted mov­ing to a Liv­ing Wage soon after, and were cer­ti­fied as a Liv­ing Wage employ­er in July this year.

3. So it’s been (a couple of months?) now – how’s it going?

It’s going great. Our staff are happy, our cus­tom­ers are happy, we know we are doing the right thing and the cost of our wage bill has­n’t gone up as much as we had pre­dicted. There’s an entire school of eco­nom­ic the­ory that could explain why that’s the case… the effi­ciency wage the­ory (which I’ll talk a bit more about in just a minute because I have a feel­ing you are about to ask me about the eco­nom­ic bene­fits of this approach).

4. Assume that I actu­ally don’t care about people – what are the eco­nom­ic bene­fits of oper­at­ing this way?

The Liv­ing Wage is good for busi­ness. Firstly, great people make great res­taur­ants, so by pay­ing the Liv­ing Wage we are tak­ing bet­ter care of our most import­ant asset. The bet­ter care we take of our staff, the bet­ter care they can take of our cus­tom­ers – and of their own fam­il­ies. Secondly, our cus­tom­ers like know­ing that the people work­ing hard to serve their meal are being paid enough to live on. Thirdly, the signs are that our costs won’t go up much – our staff are work­ing smarter to help make this move a suc­cess – this is related to the idea of the ‘effi­ciency wage’. Fourthly, it’s good for small busi­nesses like us if more people in our com­munity have a little bit more money in their pock­et – in oth­er words, we want our staff to be able to afford to eat at our res­taur­ant. And we’d like a lot of oth­er people to be able to as well.

5. If the oth­er lovely busi­ness own­ers who read the Wel­ling­tonista were think­ing about mov­ing to a liv­ing wage, do you have any advice for how they can start?

It’s pretty much impossible to say what is right for oth­er busi­nesses. We decided this was right for our busi­ness. We would encour­age oth­er busi­nesses to give it ser­i­ous thought, to look past the rhet­or­ic of the right that assumes that any­thing good for work­ers is bad for busi­ness – which is pat­ently untrue. Do your own research, and decide what’s right for you, your team and your busi­ness. And if you do decide this is the right thing to do, just do it. Don’t spend too long wor­ry­ing about it or slowly phas­ing into it. As Lucas likes to say – just rip off the plaster and get on with mak­ing it work.

6. Are you going to tell us how to make your spicy mar­gar­itas?

We are indeed. Very soon. In fact, later this week we’ll start tak­ing pre-orders for our forth­com­ing cook­book which will include the recipe for the spicy mar­gar­ita, thanks in part to the fact that Wel­ling­tonista ral­lied so many votes for it in our cook­book com­pet­i­tion!

Hur­ray for good people doing good things! This should be all the encour­age­ment you need to spend more time (and money) on their deli­cious food.