Do lowpaid jobs really offer much opportunity?
OTAGO University was smaller in 1964 (only 3482 undergraduates), and so were the orchards of Central Otago — family businesses rather than corporate behemoths.
Holiday earnings and a fees and allowances bursary (with boarding allowance if one had to leave home to study) which, unlike current student allowances, wasn’t reduced by holiday earnings, meant a student without family support could graduate debtfree.
There were no Jobbortunities summer jobs expos, such as the ODT
reported on October 5, and no commercial companies supplying seasonal workers from overseas to orchards, but many students worked on Central Otago orchards during the long vacation.
Civis’ nearly threemonth job at an orchard run by two brothers and their families, near Cromwell, was arranged through connections dating back to a grandfather based at Clyde in the early 20th century, and working from Cromwell to Roxburgh and Millers Flat — the older of the employer brothers described grandfather’s exploits travelling the gravel roads by bicycle, before he married and got a gig.
Owners of vineyards and orchards have recently bemoaned their difficulty finding workers to harvest their crops, now that shortterm employees from the Pacific, and overseas backpackers, can’t come to New Zealand.
It was surprising to learn, though, that of the over 21,000 students at Otago University, only ‘‘more than 100’’ were interested in making use of the Jobbortunities expo at the university, which aimed to match employers from the horticulture and viticulture sectors with employees for the upcoming season.
Could the low level of interest be related to pay and conditions?
Checking online, Civis found work offered on a cherry orchard at $18.90 per hour (the minimum wage), with no accommodation provided (one orchard is ‘‘generous’’ enough to offer space for tents!), and meals weren’t mentioned.
Seven other students worked with Civis in the 196465 season, four male and three female, from Auckland, Canterbury, and Otago. All were housed and fed by the owners, the boys in a bunkroom, the girls with the older brother and his wife, whose children had left home long before (the husband of one worked on the orchard).
Civis’s aftertax pay of about £14 (about £16 pretax — 150% of the thenminimum wage) for the five and ahalf days’ work a week could all be saved. By comparison, working for Whitcombe and Tombs the previous year, with no accommodation or meals supplied, had brought in about £9 a week (5 working days, one late night) after tax (plus a 10% discount on book purchases).
There were practically no entertainment costs — in the evenings the students played Mahjong (one of the brothers had a set) and other games, the Cromwell library was available, and one student spent hours in the workshop making an armchair out of wood from a discarded bed. On Sundays, most of them walked across ‘‘the desert’’ to the morning service at St Andrew’s church, where one of the owners’ wives played the organ (powered by a vacuum cleaner motor), and sang soprano, alto, tenor, and bass in the hymns (the vicar also entertained in the evenings, with recorded music, as Christmas approached).
Eleven weeks’ work paid for the
1965 accommodation costs at Civis’ residential college at university.
Now, at $18.90 an hour before tax, a student working 44 hours a week, even if paying only $100/week for living costs while working (unlikely), would take 27 weeks to earn a year’s board at that college.
Is it surprising that students aren’t rushing to fill these jobs?
Why are some New Zealand fishing boats crewed by Russians and Ukrainians?
It would be interesting to know what the companies which bring them (and Covid19) here pay them, compared with a Timarubased company which trains and employs New Zealanders to crew its boats, and was prepared to send a vessel to the Falkland Islands with a relief crew for another boat which had been isolated in the deep South for months due to Covid19 restrictions.