Job market crunch hits students, young people

Saturday, 13 July 2024

It took two months and 50 job applications before Javiera Gonzalez found part-time work in Christchurch. Ruby Pavey is still looking, handing out her CV in shopping malls.

Yet a year ago employers were desperate for workers with ‘Help Wanted’ and ‘Please be patient with our staff’ signs commonplace.

The tide has now turned leaving young people, including many students, struggling to find unskilled or part-time work.

New Zealand now has 110,000 more working-age people than a year ago and the employment rate has fallen steadily since peaking at 70% in June last year.

Job ads on Trade Me have fallen significantly across retail, customer service and hospitality and unemployment rates for young workers have soared.

Gonzalez, a 27-year-old English student from Chile, has finally found work as a kitchen assistant after months of looking.

“I had no idea how hard it would be to get a job [now in Christchurch]. Many of my friends are still looking for jobs.”

It is a long way from her experience two years ago in Queenstown where she found a job within a week, and ended up with three jobs as a cleaner, a supermarket cashier and a kitchen assistant.

Meanwhile, Pavey, 19, has applied for multiple jobs but has not even heard back from most employers.

“Some of them say come back around Christmas,” she said.

Pavey studies fine arts at Canterbury University and lives in a hall of residence. With bills to pay and no part-time job, she is finding the going tough. She avoids going out to social activities. “It’s hard. I am too scared to go out because I don’t want to spend money.”

She said she was happy to work for a minimum wage. “I was a bit more fussy at the start, now I’m looking for whatever I can get.”

The number of people on the job seeker benefit nationally has jumped by 22,000 in a year to 193,000. This figure does not include fulltime students or teens under 18 who do not qualify.

However, the latest household labour force survey shows the unemployment rate for teens aged 15 to 19 has leapt from 17% to 23% in a year, while for 20 to 24-year-olds it is up from 6% to almost 10%. Pasifika and Māori are most affected.

In Wellington, Monsoon Poon owner and Restaurant Association president Mike Egan said there was “no denying” times were tough in hospitality.

But he had managed to avoid cutting jobs in his restaurant and said he continued to employ as many “wonderful students” as he had in other years. He noted that for students, hospitality employment was often cyclical, with people holding a part-time job for the period of their studies before giving it up.

“We haven’t actually had that many CVs, I thought they must all be getting jobs.”

He enjoyed working with young people while they were students and seeing them come back to the restaurant, later in their commercial careers, as customers – some of them 20 or 30 years later.

Employer Max Bremner, who has about 220 staff across eight hospitality outlets in Christchurch, said things had changed markedly from two years ago “when it was definitely an employees’ market”.

“The worm has turned. There’s a lot more staff available.

“We were being held to ransom by staff wanting more money. But now they won’t leave because it’s so hard to find something else, and people can’t afford to pay more.

“We are getting more staff staying – there’s not the merry-go-round of staff. And places are laying off workers.”

Turnover at the till is down, especially in the central city with few winter tourists, Bremner said.

Matt Tolich, job sales director for Trade Me, said the job market was challenging “across all ages and industries”.

Nationally, retail jobs listings on Trade Me dropped 47%, comparing the first six months of this year to the same period last year. Customer service jobs on the site are down 40% and hospitality and tourism jobs down 31%.

The number of Canterbury jobs listed on Trade Me for the first half of 2024 is a third less than the same time last year.

“Sectors like retail and hospitality, which frequently hire young or unskilled workers on casual contracts, are particularly affected – especially in the winter months when people are trying to reduce on discretionary spending to help with increased bills,” Tolich said.

“When businesses look to reduce costs, they may cut casual hours, impacting the young workers in those roles.”

At the same time the number of applications for jobs were up, he said.

“With fewer available positions, the number of job applications has surged, making the competition fiercer than ever, even as a record number of Kiwis leave the country.”

Job website Seek reports Canterbury job ads fell 7% during June, and are 29% down from a year ago.

Nationally, the site has seen a 41% drop in retail positions, 40% in call centre and customer service roles, and 37% in hospitality and tourism.

– Additional reporting by Rafaella Melo