‘No other option’: Tears as tough times bring layoffs

Wednesday, 30 July 2025

At Steam and Sand in Porirua, Holly Harding has made the upsetting decision to let five staff go. She says the construction downturn is severe, and despite talk of 'hope' from the Government, little work is coming through the door.

Tears flowed as Holly Harding talked about doing the thing she never thought she would have to.

Five workers from her long-serving staff at Steam and Sand ‒ a decades-old business in Porirua that pays well and doesn’t lose workers ‒ had to be let go. Workers she counted as family, whose wives and children she knew by name.

“Purely because of lack of work,” Harding told The Post. “We had absorbed so much for so long … I’d exhausted all avenues.

“There was no other option.”

The layoffs at Steam and Sand are a microcosm of what has been happening across the country, as a construction boom has gone bust. There were more than 12,000 job losses in construction in the year to June 2025, according to Stats NZ.

Steam and Sand owner Holly Harding has this month let five staff go, due to lack of work. Harding, upset by the decision, says she did everything she could to avoid it.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon this week said the sector could now see “hope”, with a promised $6 billion worth of government infrastructure projects under way by Christmas.

“There's no doubt about it, when you mismanage an economy and create high interest rates, construction does it tougher than any other sector,” he said.

“We're doing everything we can. We've got the foot on the accelerator.”

But for Harding and those now redundant workers, it’s “too little, too late”.

“It’s all very well saying, ‘There’s this happening and that happening’, but by the time we see it, it could be a year or two away,” she said.

A worker at Steam and Sand galvanising steel. The decades-old steel sand-blasting and painting business is among construction firms that have suffered amid a major downturn.

Want to share your story about the construction downturn? Email thomas.manch@stuff.co.nz

Before the work dropped off 18 months ago, Steam and Sand had no debt and money in the bank. Business was pumping, Harding said, with 32 staff in a 4000sq metre factory full of steel being blasted and coated ‒ an important, if lesser known, part of the construction industry.

“We were sitting pretty.”

Now there’s empty space on the floor and comparatively few contracts. During a quiet Monday when The Post visited, an engineering firm delivered steel for a job in the back of a ute, instead of a truck.

Work has dropped by as much as 50%, the 10-tonne crane has stopped swinging for big loads, and colleagues across the industry arrive on site with their own stories of pain.

As work dried up amid a construction downturn over the past 18 months, Steam and Sand cut costs where ever they could be found.

The global financial crisis of 2008 was not like this.

“It has just been so quiet for so long … stagnantly low for nearly two years. I’ve never seen anything like it, and it’s not just us, it’s felt and talked about everywhere.”

Harding cut everything she could. Management took pay cuts. No more milk deliveries, no more fresh clothes for the staff each summer and winter, no more company fishing trips, no more community donations.

“That was fine … but then that wasn’t enough.”

Now, about the only structural steel job on the books is beams for a Defence Force project. There was work for McDonald’s, on the Carillon tower perched above Wellington, two bench seats headed to Featherston, poles for the transport agency’s new speed cameras.

Sanding posts for speed cameras at Steam and Sand, in Porirua.

And two artworks for Gareth Morgan’s sculpture trail visible from Transmission Gully.

“It just came to a head. It was sort of staring at me in the face.

“You can’t have loaders working on a crane, when there’s no steel to unload on a crane.”

Harding’s husband and business co-owner, Matthew Trail, shared the frustration.

Steam and Sand’s cavernous warehouses are comparatively empty these days.

“They need to introduce certainty to the market so we've got confidence.”

Asked to respond to this, Luxon said high interest rates ‒ a product of pandemic-era inflation ‒ had made for “a very difficult time”.

The Government was doing “everything we can we can to get things moving quickly with real projects, and that means shovels in the ground by Christmas”.

That meant spending on classrooms, hospitals, housing, and roads. The much-talked about fast track regime would soon be signing off projects “pretty shortly”.

Infometrics economist Brad Olsen says the construction sector has been downsizing after a major boom.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins said the Government has caused the significant construction downturn by cutting back on house, road, schools, hospital, and water infrastructure building. The Government “could start spending once again”.

“As interest rates are coming down, the building and construction sector is slowing down even more. If [Luxon’s] logic was correct, actually, you'd see that picking up as interest rates were coming down. In fact, we've seen the opposite to that.”

Economist Brad Olsen, the chief executive of Infometrics, said all parts of the construction sector were booming during the pandemic, as residential consents reached a 50-year high.

But, in hindsight, the Labour Government should have eased off on residential house building, as it was delivering considerable cost.

“It spent all of that money … and now it doesn't have quite as much left over.”

The challenge now was a change of Government had brought the usual “hold” in infrastructure spending, at the same time the construction sector was coming down from the boom.

“Interest rates came back, then Government funding and similar pulled back, and now the sector had far too many workers for the … reduced volume of work.”

Within the loss of 12,000 constructions workers in the past year, Olsen said Wellington had 1400 construction job losses. This was second only to the consultants who advised government departments, and more than the public sector, which lost 900 jobs.

Commercial construction in the capital was also down 2.2% in the year to March 2025, which Olsen said may seem a small decrease. But the ongoing projects in Wellington - the children’s hospital, work at Civic Square - were large and therefore possibly not providing work for niche or smaller businesses.

In Porirua, Harding remained hopeful she could hire back those five staff she let go. But that might not be possible for another reason ‒ one might be heading to Australia.