Plan needed to attract people into forestry

THE HEAD OF THE LOGGING CONTRACTORS organisation in New Zealand has called on the forestry industry to work together to attract more people and develop better training methods.

Ross Davis, President of the Forest Industry Contractors Association (FICA), says logging is facing serious shortages of manpower and action is needed now.

“We are desperately short of labour in some parts of the country,” he told the 2017 New Zealand Institute of Forestry annual conference in Rotorua last month.

“When the Forest Service existed, we had a plan. Since the Forest Service has gone, we don’t have a plan. All the companies that own the forests now have their own agendas around training and attracting people. There’s been no overall plan and that’s something we need to get back on track.

“We’re told technology will help but we have got a huge problem coming before new technology arrives – there’s a big gap developing. Technology won’t be able to fill some of these things and at the end of the day we will need people who can actually do the job.

“Contractors have opportunities to grow their businesses but can’t find the right people who want to work and will pass a drug test. That’s a sad indictment.”

Some Kiwi contractors are already advertising in Australia for machinery operators in mines and those who moved to forestry jobs across the Tasman to return home and the wages on offer are very attractive. But that is having limited success, says Mr Davis.

One solution would be to import people to fill the vacancies, but he describes that process as being very hard and full of potential problems.

“As an industry, we have to look at whether we go down that immigration track,” says Mr Davis. “And if we do we need to support them and make sure they don’t get into a situation where they are being underpaid or ripped off.”

Suggestions that forestry could fill its vacancies from the large number of unemployed people in New Zealand is not the answer, he adds.

“We find it very hard to train those people,” says Mr Davis. “Lots of money has been spent on these schemes over the years and the results are very bad. As few as 1-in20 who come out of those courses end up as full-time employees in the forest. It’s a bad use of resources. We’ve got to get smarter than that.”

A large part of the problem, says Mr Davis, is down to the public perception of forestry, which he says is “terrible”.

“We’ve got to get into the schools and promote the industry,” he continues. “We need to start thinking as a group about how we can do that.”

NZL