We hear in news about salaries being not enough for many parts of the economy. and some stories appear quite compelling.. but they are missing key statistics of hours worked and salary paid.. And we don’t know demographic income of certain parts of industry eg farming.. some may suggest some farm workers are on minimum wage, and the farm owner is creaming the profits.. but that is all opinion. 

IRD requires employers to supply substantive information on income tax for individuals.. but one key stat that is not passed to IRD, is hours they are paid for.. and in many cases this information is readily available in their systems, just not sent to IRD.

If we got hours worked plus job type (title), work location, if the person was a immigrant or NZ citizen, ethnicity, sex, we could have substantive stats that could be published from IRD like

 

• hours worked versus avg hourly rates, hypotheses being people on lower incomes work longer hours
• average pay & hours worked in parts of country
• are immigrants filling high paid jobs or low paid jobs in each industry
• do we have gender wage problem, as we could break down average hourly rate per job type & gender
• do we have a ethnicity wage problem, as we could break down average hourly rate per job type & ethnicity 

These stats also allow us to see if things improve over time eg gender pay rates.   I would so like to compare my wage to market, but I can't, unless I start applying for jobs and get to the end of the process to see final offer.