‘Who am I if I don’t have that job?’

Redundancy is especially painful when your self-image is closely linked to the work you do. But at least the jobless won’t be ‘‘thrown on the scrapheap’’ as happened in the 1980s. Susan Edmunds reports.

Until last month, Kelly Bertrand had worked at the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly for almost all her adult life. She joined the magazine as a staff writer, working her way up to become deputy editor in 2019.

‘‘My whole identity was wrapped up in my job. I loved my job, and the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly. I started at 20, had my 21st there.’’

She watched friends go overseas, marry, buy houses while she devoted herself to her career.

‘‘I’m single, I don’t have a house … my job was my cool thing. It didn’t matter if I didn’t have that stuff because I had a cool job.’’

Then, she and her Bauer Media colleagues were sent a text summoning them to a Zoom meeting, with half an hour’s notice.

At that meeting, since referred to as the ‘‘Zoom of doom’’, they were told that Bauer was closing its New Zealand operations and all their jobs were being made redundant with immediate effect.

The magazine Bertrand and her colleagues had spent the past week working on would never reach readers.

‘‘We had no idea it was coming … you kind of go through a grieving process, without being insensitive.

‘‘You go through every emotion under the sun. I was left wondering, ‘who am I if I don’t have that job’?’’

While it was Bertrand’s first experience of being made redundant, she is not alone.

In the past week, Fletcher Building has revealed plans to lay off 1500 of its workers, 1000 of whom are in roles based in New Zealand. Air New Zealand confirmed it was cutting 1300 roles.

Earlier in the month, Event Cinemas revealed its plans to restructure – it is believed it wants to reduce labour costs by half. Bunnings proposed to close seven stores.

In the first full week of level 4 lockdown, an extra 9470 people signed up to the Jobseeker Support benefit, of whom 8569 were ‘‘work-ready’’. In the week ended May 15, the most recent for which data is available, another 1600 began receiving it.

People can only qualify for Jobseeker Support if they do not have a working partner, so the number of people who have lost work is likely to be much higher.

‘‘The big headline number is the tip of the iceberg,’’ Infometrics chief forecaster Gareth Kiernan said.

‘‘What we don’t read about is the small businesses where the number is nowhere near as exciting as Air New Zealand or Fletchers.’’

A tally of the reported redundancies so far had already topped 10,000, he said.

There was likely to be more pain ahead when the businesses who had been getting the wage subsidy had that money run out. At the moment, the wage subsidy is supporting nearly 60 per cent of the New Zealand labour force.

Many businesses would find they no longer had the customer base they had before the lockdown and would need to downsize to meet the new market.

The extension of the wage subsidy to the hardest hit firms would buy a few more months but then there would be another wave, he said. The Employers and Manufacturers Association (EMA) has reported a surge in inquiries about restructuring and redundancy processes.

Chief executive Brett O’Riley said businesses were facing tough decisions.

‘‘Calls to our AdviceLine on restructuring and redundancy since March are now double the usual rate of inquiries. Since the lockdown began on March 25 until yesterday we’ve fielded 650 calls about restructure and redundancy. That represents nearly 10 per cent of our membership base,’’ he said. ‘‘We’ve already had almost 200 inquiries this month with nearly two full working weeks left in May. With the deadline for the first tranche of the wage subsidy approaching in June, I expect the figure for May to exceed the 250 inquiries we had in March.’’

O’Riley said while redundancies in big firms were the most visible, the majority of EMA members were small to medium-sized businesses and that was where the most damage would occur when the current wage subsidy ran out and the tighter restrictions for phase two of the subsidy kicked in.

‘‘While many businesses are able to operate at something near normal at alert level 2, there are also many businesses that can’t open or remain uneconomic under level 2 restrictions. That strengthens the case for moving to level 1 as soon as possible if the health conditions allow,’’ he said.

The association’s head of advocacy, Alan McDonald, said even businesses that did not meet the 50 per cent revenue drop requirement to continue to receive the wage subsidy were suffering to the point where they needed to cut staff numbers.

McDonald said there had been a lack of assistance with cashflow.

The Government-backed loan scheme had not delivered what was intended, he said, and the Inland Revenue-administered scheme that offers loans of $10,000 plus $1800 per employee did not go far enough.

A business with 5-10 employees would typically have outgoings of $14,000 a month and only half of that would be wage-related, he said.

While level 2 might feel ‘‘normal’’ for many people, businesses were still suffering and getting to level 1 should be a priority, unless there were compelling health reasons not to.

‘‘It’s only been a couple of months and we are already at the level of unemployment experienced in the global financial crisis.’’ Shamubeel Eaqub, economist