Part-time and under-employed

Arecent Infometrics report on Marlborough’s economy confirms that while our region will have ongoing unemployment at higher than usual levels, our biggest labour challenge is getting sufficient trained people to do the jobs available.

Reinforcing that has been the Building Construction Industry Training Organisation (BCITO) forecasting that Marlborough needs up to 1800 more workers in construction alone from next year onwards to meet a looming halfa-billion-dollar surge in regional building projects.

Marlborough’s interim Regional Skills Leadership Group has confirmed that until we complete our work in June, our focus is on under-employment – that is, local people who work part time or seasonally but who want more work.

The latest Labour Market Summary from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) for the December 2020 quarter shows we are not using all available labour as best we might in a region with a growing shortage of workers.

The number of people categorised as ‘‘under-employed’’ rose 16.7 per cent in the last quarter of 2020 to 1400 people.

That’s a lot of people who are in parttime or seasonal employment who would like to, and are available to, work more hours.

Part-time work is prevalent for women and Ma¯ ori in our region, and they are more likely to be under-employed.

Marlborough also has a relatively high level of unskilled workers, again a group more likely to be under-employed.

There’s another measure called the labour under-utilisation rate. This is the total number of those who are underemployed or unemployed, including available jobseekers.

In Marlborough last December, there were 3200 ‘‘under-utilised’’ people, up 28 per cent from the same time the previous year. (The December Labour Market Summary is a snapshot picture, not a full analysis.)

Covid-19 has contributed to the number of those in Marlborough who are under-employed or under-utilised. Tourism and hospitality businesses in particular have shed staff, and some other employers are more reluctant to hire until the economic outlook becomes clearer.

Marlborough’s reliance on seasonal work contributes to our underemployment picture. Some of those engaged in work such as grape pruning actually want full-time jobs.

As a group, we’ve already been working with contractors and others to support initiatives that will stitch together periods of work across the year.

Yet as a region we have for many years had considerable dependency on imported labour. That’s not just 3000 RSE (Recognised Seasonal Employer) workers a year; we usually import 1000 people for vintage. However, with a collective effort we managed to get through 2021 with no extra imports.

Our tourism and hospitality businesses have also had high reliance on those with working holiday visas.

What we now have to face up to as a community is that we may not be able to continue to rely on imported labour.

This has long been identified as an issue. A 2017 report prepared for the

Marlborough Chamber of Commerce with MBIE funding identified labour supply as our biggest economic development challenge. The report, by consultant Tony Smale, said that while Marlborough needed to attract and retain an appropriate immigrant workforce as a short-term measure, we had to retain and develop our young people.

Reflecting the fact we have the highest retirement population nationally, he also said we must give older people the skills and opportunities to continue working.

Smale found a high level of competition for staff and a misbelief that Marlborough offers such an attractive lifestyle that staff will ‘‘spontaneously be drawn to the region’’.

He looked at the issue of whether it was a perception or reality that we had low wages; he found we sat around the middle of regional household incomes and also around the middle of housing affordability.

The Marlborough interim Regional Skills Leadership Group has now asked our two locally based MBIE staff to review those figures as part of our work on under-employment.

What is already clear is that we face some real challenges ahead to meet labour shortages, and it will take a determined region-wide community effort, supported by MBIE and other government agencies, to recruit and train more of our own people.