Union ‘no’ to Chinese tradie visas

Unions will tell Immigration New Zealand not to let a Chinese construction company import 174 migrant trades workers here after seeing their employment contracts.

E tu¯ spokesman Joe Gallagher said Fu Wah would pay migrant decorators $25 an hour to finish off its $200 million Park Hyatt hotel on Auckland’s waterfront.

The migrants would have to pay for their own travel to and from work, and accommodation costs, while they stayed for the project completion in April 2019.

Gallagher said paying such low wages, and forcing the migrants to deduct living costs from their own pay, was exploitative.

Quality painters and tilers should be paid a minimum of $32 an hour according to local market rates, he said.

Fu Wah’s lawyer showed Gallagher the contracts at a meeting two weeks ago.

The employment contracts were not good enough to attract local tradespeople, he said, so the union could not support its application for an approval in principal (AIP) licence where a genuine effort to hire local workers must be justified.

At the meeting, the lawyer indicated that he did not have the authority to negotiate the terms of the employment contracts, Gallagher said.

The New Zealand Council of Trade Unions (NZCTU) national secretary Sam Huggard said it would support E tu¯ ’s decision not to back Fu Wah’s application.

The NZCTU would tell Immigration to decline Fu Wah’s accredited employer status application on Thursday.

However, Fu Wah could still be granted an AIP application despite unions pulling their support. The AIP approval process requires consultation with unions and can take a matter of months.

The licence to recruit overseas workers for jobs where skills shortages were common was only granted if an attempt to hire local workers first was proved.

Huggard said union advice was noted but rarely affected decisions. Often, Immigration NZ did not notify the NZCTU of application outcomes, he said.

Fu Wah applied for the licence on February 9. The NZCTU was notified of the application two weeks later.

Huggard said Fu Wah consulted with the NZCTU before filing the Immigration NZ application, which was ‘‘unusual’’.

The union took Fu Wah’s word that it wanted to work with it to attract local talent, but consultation since then had ‘‘disappointed’’ the NZCTU, he said.

‘‘We took their word for it. In the end, their commitment to paying the local market rate is just not there.’’

Fu Wah’s New Zealand general manager, Richard Aitken, said the company had advertised the 174 jobs locally online before Christmas, but could not find the number and quality of workers it needed.

He said earlier this month that the Park Hyatt migrant workers would not be used for its other construction projects.