Temp workers are making hay as businesses struggle to fill jobs while waiting for migrant labour to return

Friday, 2 September 2022

Temp workers are filling vacant jobs in hotels, offices, and factories.

Temp workers like Emily Jones are an answer to a prayer for thousands of employers facing the double whammy of staff sickness and severe labour shortages.

The 29-year-old Brit arrived in early July on a working holiday visa, and almost immediately landed temporary reception and PA jobs with an Auckland property development company in Viaduct Harbour.

Freedom to travel between temp placements is a big drawcard for backpackers, but it is unclear when and how many migrant workers will turn up now the border is open.

Meantime, despite hourly pay rates for some temporary work rising by close to 40%, recruitment agencies are competing for a diminishing pool of “bodies” to fill vacancies for a wide range of positions from chefs and shop assistants to office workers.

**READ MORE:

British temp worker Emily Jones is happy to have landed a well paying job in Auckland’s Viaduct Harbour.

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Suppremo specialises in supplying temps for Auckland hospitality venues, and on Wednesday staff manager Anna Pyrrho was scrambling to find up to 50 workers by this weekend.

Hotel housekeepers are in high demand as employers in a tight labour market with an unemployment at its lowest since the early 1980s. (File photo)

“We have people who are quite desperate, and they’ll pay any price. It’s a crazy market at the moment.”

Suppremo relied heavily on migrant labour pre-Covid, and although Pyrrho has noticed a trickle of South American arrivals, she is yet to see the Europeans who once made up a substantial slice of her workforce.

“I had a lot of great people who left, they just got tired, they were not included in the residency scheme … they just gave up and went home.”

Robyn Maguire owns small Auckland temp agency The Third Hand, and she can’t keep up with demand from caterers and event organisers. Entry level jobs such as dishwashers are among the hardest to fill

Pre-pandemic she supplemented her 28 permanent staff with a pool of 50 to 100 casuals, but that has dropped by about half because many are pulling extra shifts in their full time jobs.

Rather than foot the bill for temp workers sourced through an agency, Venues Ōtautahi used volunteers from community groups to make up staff numbers for three big events last weekend, including the sold out match between the All Blacks and Argentina at Orangetheory Stadium.

A recent advertisement drew just 11 applicants, eight of whom were overseas. “I managed to employ one person out of 11, the majority of them didn't come back to me.”

At the Waitakere Resort and Spa where the 28 staff include two temps, managing director Reg Nevill-Jackson says the quality of temps provided through agencies was at times “pretty atrocious,” but they were needed to fill roster gaps exacerbated by Covid-19.

“We never got through a month without one or two [staff] having to isolate for a week.”

Temps are expensive, about 1½ times the cost of a permanent staffer, “but if the business is there, you want to be able to provide services to your guests,” and Nevill-Jackson is holding out for the arrival of two key migrant workers from India and Dubai.

Venues Ōtautahi, in Christchurch was 120 workers short of the 500 required last weekend for a sold out All Blacks match, a Wiggles performance, and the Big Sing event, but instead of hiring through a temp agency, for the first time ever it recruited volunteers from charities, schools and sports clubs.

They were paid the living wage to serve and sell drinks and food, raising $14,000 for the seven community organisations involved, and Venues Ōtautahi chief executive Caroline Harvie-Teare says the successful volunteer effort will probably be repeated in “the tightest labour market we have seen.”

Cost is also a big deterrent for short-staffed cafes and restaurants, and only a small proportion of 104 respondents to a recent Restaurant Association survey had used temps over the past four months, but of those who did, 70% used them more frequently.

Association chief executive Marisa Bidois says operators are reducing menus and opening hours to cope with staffing shortages which must be addressed before the busy summer season.

Todd Wackrow, New Zealand country manager for temp app Sidekicker, says temps tended to be regarded as “second class citizens”, but that is changing as employers recognise their importance.

Why temping is tempting

Jones was temping in Australia and about to head across the Tasman when the New Zealand border closed in 2020, so she returned to the UK for two years, where a temporary job doing business support turned into a permanent position.

“You get to check out different roles and whether a company is a good fit for you.”

She says the immediacy of temping is also a drawcard for job-hunting travellers. “You’re not waiting around for months without work.”

About 2500 temps registered with the Sidekicker app can pick shifts that suit them, and employers have the option of paying a little more for access to a talent pool of experienced staff they have used previously.

Sidekicker country manager Todd Wackrow says it can’t handle the huge increase in demand from businesses, particularly in the hospo and events sectors.

He hopes a rise in hits from overseas jobseekers translates into new registrations when travellers and international students arrive here.

Beyond Recruitment chief executive Liza Viz says that in the past temp workers were often international students, young people taking gap years and baby boomers looking to work while travelling.

Meantime, there has been a noticeable up tick in primary caregivers looking for flexible hours as they re-enter the workforce, and in people already in full-time work looking for extra hours to cover mortgage or cost of living increases.

Auckland Joshua Gross has a day job in marketing, and he uses Sidekicker to pick up casual shifts from bar tending at Spark Arena to sticking labels on bottles of Lewis Road Creamery milk.

Working from home became the norm for many office workers during Covid-19 and that trend has extended to temp jobs too.

“It's cash for me if I don’t have anything on at weekends.”

Big pay rises

Recruitment agencies agree the dramatic increase in pay rates reflects the fact temp workers are in the box seat for a change.

The ready availability of permanent positions has soaked up a lot of their regulars, and temping as a lifestyle choice is a little less attractive as people become more concerned about job security and the possibility of a recession.

Beyond Recruitment chief executive Liza Viz says temp rates for the white collar workers she hires have shot up between 20% and nearly 40%, and that leads to a lot of “job hopping”.

She says customer service roles can now command $30 an hour, and a temp executive assistant previously paid $45 an hour can now get $60.

Another noticeable change is that, rather than placements of days or weeks, at least three months is now standard.

Tribe Recruitment head of business and accounting support Cathi Thomson says remote working is now much more accepted for temps.

“Two or three years ago that just wouldn’t have happened, the level of trust would not be there for them to have a temp working at home, but that’s what temps are demanding and that’s what they’re getting.”

Thomson recruited Jones, and says only about 5% of her temps are currently on work visas, versus up to 70% pre-Covid-19

“We’re starting to see an upward trend, but it’s not as rapid as we may have hoped.”

In a recent Infometrics newsletter, economist Nick Brunsden points out that the number of 20- to 29-year-olds, a very important part of the labour market, declined by 21,580 in the year to June, and many would be embarking on pandemic-delayed OEs.

Viz is already seeing evidence of that. “In the last six to eight months it has got worse, as the borders have opened up, so too has the traffic out.”

Job adverts tell a different story

Seek and TradeMe combine job advertisements for contract and temp jobs, and at the end of August there were just over 8000 such roles offered across the two websites.

TradeMe job sales director Matt Tolich says in the three months to the end of July, there was an 18% drop in contract and temp listings nationally compared with the same period last year, and the average salary for these jobs dropped 2% to $60,344.

For the year to date, just 8% of job advets on Seek were for contract and temp jobs, the lowest since 2013, and demand for full time workers (81% of adverts) was at its highest.

Seek says this is probably driven by business demand for permanent employees, and that reflects the experience of Rob Carroll, operations manager of Hamilton Jet in Christchurch.

He says traditionally the cyclical nature of the business meant up to 22% of Hamilton Jet’s 220 workers were temps, but the lack of suitably qualified workers had forced the company to take on more permanent staff.

AW Fraser’s foundry is just down Lunns Rd from Hamilton Jet, and managing director Gordon Sutherland is in a similar bind.

He also employed temps to cope with business peaks and troughs, but the dearth of skilled process workers of any kind is really beginning to hurt.

“I’m 20 to 30 people short, that’s more than 10% of my workforce.”

As a consequence Sutherland is having to “ration sales,” turning away people he has supplied for decades, and if he added up the value of business lost “I’d cry.”

Like Carroll, he is trying to bring in experienced overseas workers, but it is slow-going, and he has already lost some Filipinos who opted to go to Canada instead “because they make it easer”.

Sutherland says three manufacturers in Lunns Rd export more than $250m worth of product a year between them, and they are all in the same boat over labour shortages.

“It’s just ridiculous we are in this position.”

Brunsden warns it is unwise to bank on migrant workers in numbers arriving any time soon, even with some easing of immigration settings.

“It remains to be seen how successful we will be at attracting migrant workers in a globally tight labour market, and whether Immigration NZ can process visas in time for the summer tourism peak.”