At the heart of this project is one foundational question – using Purchasing Power Parity, Is there a Global Living Wage that enables people, organisations and communities to prosper and thrive?
This video captures the spirit of Project GLOW as an expanding and increasingly high profile network of scholars and activists working to eradicate poverty.
“Project GLOW is a unique global network of research service and teaching hubs (SIOP, 2017). GLOW began in 2016, prompted by the prior work on poverty eradication by Stuart C. Carr at Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand. As pointed out in a superb summary of the project’s aims and ambit, and links to the United Nations SDGs (Scott, 2017), in 2016, half of all people classified in the world as “extremely poor” were not unemployed but working, in jobs. Dealing with “working poverty” has become a strategic objective for poverty reduction. The road to achieving this is by establishing true living sustainable wages that enable people (and organizations) to not only survive but, more importantly, to flourish and thrive. This emphasis on shared prosperity is emphasized in SDGs 9 and 10, for example.” – SIOP (2017)
This project provides the opportunity for researchers to join forces to collaborate on a single, major, innovative, international, interdisciplinary, inter-generational, applied research project on the topic of a global living organizational wage. It includes current work on the Living Wage and its links to poverty reduction through Sustainable Livelihood and Decent Work.
A research group identified as End Poverty and Inequality Cluster (EPIC) exists within the School of Psychology at Massey University and is the nominal site of this collaborative research project. It is closely supported in this project by Massey University’s MPOWER unit (Massey People, Organization, Work and Employment Relations) and the Global Organization for Humanitarian Work Psychology (GOHWP).
Our goal is to help fill a vacuum on living wages as a largely organizational-level policy that may make a real difference to human and organizational development. This aim chimes especially but not exclusively with the wider United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, in particular with: SDG 1 – Eradicating poverty in all its forms everywhere; SDG 8 – promoting Decent Work that meets people’s everyday aspirations and values; SDG 10 – ending inequality; and SDG 17 – partnership for development.
Please see Project GLOW Fact sheet for more information.