He has also made a personal commitment to base his own income on the living wage, although the issue is complicated because the church provides him with accommodation.
"I, like every high income earner, needs to reflect on their own personal commitment to supporting the living wage in their organisation, and therefore the appropriate policy that they might have in relation to their wage," he said.
The living wage was first set at $18.40 an hour in 2013 based on actual spending by couples with two children in the lower half of income earners. That spending was translated into an hourly rate that both parents would need to earn if one parent worked 40 hours a week and the other worked 20 hours.
Updates, to $18.80 last year and now to $19.25, have been based on simple percentage increases in average ordinary-time hourly earnings, keeping the living wage at 68.2 per cent of the gross average wage. Fuller spending-based reviews are planned every five years.
Mr Waldegrave said it would be unrealistic to raise the legal minimum wage to that level, but he said the living wage was meant as a voluntary "aspirational" target.
"If employers want to make sure the people working for them are taking home enough money to look after their families, they should be paying a living wage," he said.
"The key group we want to get are the ones that are using public money, which are the local authorities. They should be leading the trend, as has happened elsewhere."
Wellington City Council lifted all its 450 employees to the original living wage of $18.40 by last July but has not yet extended the policy to its council-controlled organisations and contractors, such as cleaners.
Auckland Mayor Len Brown proposed a living wage of $18.40 for his council staff before the 2013 council elections but the proposal has not yet been implemented.
* On the web: www.livingwage.org.nz
The trouble with zero hours contracts
Hamilton student Melissa Goodman thought she was being offered a job for 15 hours a week at $16 an hour -- until she got home and read the small print.
The job, advertised through Student Job Search, involved promoting various products door-to-door.
"I got to the interview. He was like, 'Yes we want you'. He advertised it as 15 hours a week at $16 an hour. So the deal had been done," Ms Goodman said.
"Then I got the contract home and realised that everything he said was just bulls***. It was a completely casual contract -- there were no guaranteed hours, there was no guaranteed pay, there was no guarantee of even having work from week to week."
Ms Goodman sought advice from the Hamilton-based Young Workers' Resource Centre, one of just 30 Kiwi employers that have signed up so far to pay its employees the 'living wage'.
The centre's sole fulltime employee, former journalist Tony Stevens, helped her to complain, first to Student Job Search and then to Seek after she spotted the same advertisement on its website.
Student Job Search removed the advertisement and Seek changed its wording.
Mr Stevens said such 'zero hours' contracts were now prevalent "just about anywhere where young people are getting hired".
"It's not just fast-food," he said. "It's in hospitality. Supermarkets will do it. Hospitality and retail are probably where young people actually get their start."
Mr Stevens is on the living wage campaign's Waikato steering group and is disappointed that most of the employers who have signed up to the living wage so far are either unions or very small organisations like his.
"I think employers are nervous about it, and perhaps we haven't been campaigning as hard to get people accredited," he said. "We could be doing a better job extolling the benefits of it."
