Workers no longer settling for crumbs

Thursday, 5 March 2020

On any day of the week at almost any time of the year downtown Queenstown is little different to Singapore on a bank holiday.

At first glance there would seem to be few things in common between the Waipa District and Queenstown.

Waipa, in the centre of the vast Waikato Basin, is the heartland of rural North Island with an economy based firmly on pastural farming and horticulture. The two picturesque towns of Cambridge, said to be more English than England, and Te Awamutu provide a full range of agricultural support industries with tourism in a distant second place but growing slowly.

Stock and station agents still sell gumboots, Swandri shirts and possum traps and the people in Waipa towns still observe some of the now quaint social interactions of a bygone era such as a smile and a nod and even casual conversations with strangers in the street.

Queenstown, in Otago in the south-west of the South Island, could hardly be more different. With an urban population of about 16,000 permanent residents but many times that number during the peak of the winter tourism season centered on the, often dangerous, adventure and ski tourism. Farming in the harsh Otago hinterland is predominantly high country runs with about 40,000 people in an area of almost 9,000 square kilometres.

* Blatant and endemic: Illegal 'volunteer' labour rife in NZ's accommodation industry

* Hotel staff shortages spell trouble for tourism**

On any day of the week at almost any time of the year downtown Queenstown is little different to Singapore on a bank holiday with thousands of international tourists shoulder to shoulder like bees in a hive. Almost every language in the world can be heard on the street, in restaurants and bars and every imaginable international cuisine is available. Shops sell high priced trinkets, possum fur clothing ski boots, a million varieties of coffee and bill caps with Kiwi motifs made in China.

In spite of their differences however both communities face the same shortage of affordable housing and available employees with Waipa apparently needing to generate an estimated 1000 jobs every year, for the next five years, to replace its existing workforce and to keep pace with growth.

In a report presented to the Waipa District Council's Strategic Planning and Policy Committee Infometrics economist Brad Olsen has suggested there needs to a co-ordinated approach across the Waikato to ensure people were being trained and educated with the skills to match the business and employment opportunities.

He also stated the obvious when he advised the committee that New Zealand had brought in skills from other countries but immigration had 'slipped away' because the previous Government had 'set the bar high' when it came to requirements to work in New Zealand.

In Queenstown a similar shortage of affordable housing and employees has created some understandable anxiety for the tourism industry and city burghers. With the average wage for bar and restaurant workers at around $18 per hour, marginally above the minimum wage, it is not surprising there is a shortage of available staff. For a forty-hour week that would bring in about $750 before tax. Match that with property values in the top end tourism destination at around $1.175 million and rentals over $700 per week some employees are working 60 to 70 hours a week and sharing beds in a single room costing about $300 a week.

What does not seem to have dawned on employers in both communities is that things on the job scene have changed considerably in the past few years and it is now an employee's market.

Nationally we have unemployment hovering at about four percent which equates to about 110,000 people looking for work. Some of them no doubt will be untrainable and unemployable due to a variety of reasons from drug use to disabilities but there are still more than enough people fill available vacancies. The difference now, compared to a decade ago, is that skilled workers are now longer prepared to work for pittance wages and they longer have to. As well the Government is unlikely to relax the current rules around temporary migrant workers which have traditionally provided a cheap work force and kept wages down.

That leaves one obvious solution which employees, particularly in the tourism industry, have steadfastly refused to accept; a significant increase in wages at all levels. That is not just a few miserable cents an hour, but several dollars more. No one these days, particularly in skilled jobs, should be paid less than $25 an hour minimum.

Those employers who pay well have never had a problem attracting good, loyal staff. Those who took advantage of the demise of the trade union movement, following the disastrous Employment Contracts Act of 1990, and relied on an underpaid work force for profitability now face the reality that neoliberalism works both ways and this is market forces at work. Get used to it.