How times have changed for Waitara
"I started on $13 a week. Mum got $8 of it, from memory, for board."
Idon’t know if you’ve noticed it yet, but there’s a growing trend to build housing on the back half of our famous Kiwi 1/4 acre sections.
It wasn’t that long ago that we all had the opportunity to buy our own homes on a 1/4 acre.
State Advance loans had cheap interest rates so everyone could get a loan for a new home, provided you owned your own section.
With your new house on the section, a tax rebate from the Government for improvements, such as paths and fences, meant you could have a new Skyline shed on the property after the first year or so at refund time.
This seems a dream for most young ones today.
Many now can’t see any opportunity to have their own home and more and more teenagers are living at home with their parents, while those in the workforce are relying on parents or grandparents to raise their offspring.
Have we all gone mad in this bustling crazy world where the dollar rules our lives, to the point where were running around in circles to meet our debts every week?
We’ve become so materialistic. Do we really need all the toys?
We’re heading into a world where we’ll all be renting off the rich and it’s not that far away either.
The bickering and politics in the workplace today make the working life of most people stressful and unbearable to be a part of.
To have an excellent boss with human values and a good working environment is becoming a rarity for most.
I’d love to see apprenticeships back in vogue again, but the low wages aren’t a big attraction these days. I started my butchery apprenticeship in 1970, and here’s a prime example of the era I grew up in.
I started on $13 a week. Mum got $8 of it, from memory, for board. I’d always wanted to be a retail butcher and was excited to be in the workforce standing on my own two feet.
Friends I was with at high school also got various apprenticeships and we all met up at Trade School in Trentham where we stayed while doing courses in Wellington for two weeks.
Many other friends, not interested in being tied to an apprenticeship for four years and the low wages, went straight to the Waitara freezing works.
We were horrified to learn they were taking home $60+ a week! But the security of an apprenticeship and ‘‘having something at the end of it’’ was the drawcard for most of us.
To me $60, a journeyman butchers weekly wage, seemed a lot of money and worth working towards.
Sadly when I had completed my apprenticeship in 1974 the weekly wage was still only $60! We had a very weak butcher’s union, I can tell you.
By 1978 I started in the old Borthwicks butcher shop in Waitara and wages were considerably higher than normal. Boy did we work hard in that shop. With 800 to 1000 men in the workforce booking meat up, the shop was very busy but a lot of fun. We had a great team of guys there.
We started at four in the morning on Mondays and made the small goods and boned the baconers for smoking. Borthwicks still had the bacon factory then and the smell was divine.
I bought a 1/4 acre section and had a new Keith Hay home built at their yard at Bell Block and shifted to the site in 1979. The house cost $26,000 and the freehold section $2000.
Then came the huge Borthwicks fire in 1979.
What devastation! Lambs undamaged by the fire were sorted and for many months I manned the butcher shop bandsaw and cut frozen lambs to sell through the shop. Out the legs and shoulders and bags of chops went by the thousand. Unbelievable!
The lamb legs cost $3, shoulders $3 and a 5kg bags of chops was $5.
In 1983 the old butcher shop closed and the new one opened and, grasping the opportunity, I started on the boning floor.
Suddenly my wages skyrocketed and I was suddenly earning $500 to $600 a week in the hand. I could buy a new fridge or oven or stereo and pay cash! Things were looking up!
It was also at this time that Think Big was Muldoon’s answer to New Zealand’s future prosperity and interest rates went through the roof.
Just as well I changed jobs as my mortgage payments rose dramatically. Things tightened up considerably. But we were OK.
Waitara started losing its industries one by one and the new bypass crippled the retail shops in Waitara. The car assembly plant, John Mack’s Swandri factory, the Solexin plant and others followed and soon the freezing industry was to suffer.
By 1989 the freezing industry was in dire straits. Borthwicks had sold to Waitaki International and Waitaki sold to Affco and the end was in sight.
From 1986 to 89 boning in the calf season meant huge money for 10 to 12 weeks. My biggest weekly pay in the late 1980s was $2100 net. Start at six in the morning, cut the tally by 11 o’clock and be home by lunchtime and paid till five o’clock.
But this was not going to last and I took advantage of the opportunity to pay off my mortgage when redundancies came in 1989.
Poor management decisions, an unreasonable union and a greedy workforce led to the demise of a long-running industry that gave jobs to many thousands of people over the generations.
So what have we here today? An amazing town steeped in history with its own special ecoclimate, rising property prices and a host of fast food outlets. How times have changed.