Here are some of the jobs that Kiwi’s can’t, or won’t, do
One of the biggest problems with the labour market is there are jobs no-one wants. Fruit-pickers were recently found to be lacking in New Zealand, but there are plenty of other jobs Kiwis avoid.
Professor Paul Spoonley, Massey University provice chancellor of the college of humanities and social sciences, said Kiwis tended to avoid "the lower skilled, lower paid and more precarious jobs", jobs with no long-term career associated with them.
"They’re very often seasonal and in places where there aren’t many New Zealanders," he said.
"New Zealand is desperately short of skilled workers and our immigration programme is focussed on recruited skilled or economic migrants, but in the last 20 years there’s been a significant growth in short-term, low paid employment that is part of the service sector. There’s not enough people locally."
In Mount Cook Village, for example, nearly all the hospitality and food workers are temporary migrants on short-term work and study visas. Why?
"Because they simply can’t get New Zealanders to go to a place like Mount Cook Village - to live there," Spoonley said.
Statistics NZ data shows the sectors with the most significant drops in employment by industry in the year to September 2017 were arts, recreation, information technology (IT) and wholesale trade.
ARE PEOPLE CONCERNED ABOUT RESPECT?
There are certain career paths young people won’t pursue because they believe they would not impress family and friends.
People want jobs that command respect, but there will always be jobs that are not well-paid or particularly dazzling.
"We have seen jobs become less desirable because we do have expectations about what we want our children to do, but the other side of that is that many of those jobs simply don’t provide a living wage. If you’re going to see it as a long-term job, is it going to provide you enough income to rent or buy a house and to provide enough food and access to healthcare?" Spoonley said.
What about the janitors, maids, taxi drivers, sewerage workers, garbage collectors and meat processors?
"Many of the jobs mentioned are not well-paid or do not have particularly good options of career development or increasingly salary over time," he said.
"Your taxi driver is very likely to be an immigrant. Taxi driving was one of the first industries where we saw a very significant rise in immigrants working in the industry. That’s a very long-established one."
Spoonley said immigrant labour was now "essential" to certain industries and occupations.
TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY
New Zealand has seen a significant escalation in the number of tourists visiting, Spoonley said - people who needed to be fed and housed.
"You need workers, but these are very often not full-time jobs and they’re not particularly well-paid jobs," he said.
"If you took tourism in the South Island of New Zealand, without working holiday visa immigrants, you simply would not be able to continue your business."
Hospitality and tourism jobs are often poorly paid, he said.
"You don’t get a living wage off many of the jobs in the hospitality industry. Typically it is a student, and that might be an international student or a local student, who is working in that job - but only temporarily."
TOO RELIANT ON IMMIGRANTS?
Should New Zealand be doing more in terms of upskilling Kiwis to provide them with employment, and are we too reliant on immigrants? Spoonley said the answer was yes to both.
In the year to September 2017, Asian employment was up 11.3 per cent (36,000), Ma¯ori employment was up 7.6 per cent (21,900), and ’other’ - predominantly made up of people who self-identify as New Zealanders - was up 114 per cent (23,000).
"We need to be monitoring immigrants in our labour market, but we do need to make sure we’re upskilling the New Zealand population so they can get jobs in the 21st century. The nature of jobs in New Zealand is changing very significantly. Almost half of all current jobs will have disappeared in a decade and there’ll be new jobs - and what do those jobs look like, and are we training people for them?"
Prior to the global financial crisis, New Zealand had the biggest skills shortage in the OECD. Spoonley said we are heading back into that territory.
"I think what’s disappointing is that because the Government hasn’t funded enough places to train people, we are seeing those shortages expand, so that for example, we’re now desperately short of teachers. And you’re going to see more teachers trained, but you’re also going to see teachers recruited from overseas."
TEACHING ’NOT DESIRABLE’
There were three main reasons teaching was becoming a less attractive career option for Kiwis, Spoonley said.
"First, it’s not seen as a particularly desirable career because a number of people have tended to deride it. The second is that, compared with some countries, we don’t pay our teachers particularly well. And the third factor is that if you’re in Auckland, then a standard teacher’s salary is not sufficient. Should there be salary loading for Auckland teachers?"
Spoonley said New Zealand was getting to the point where the Government needed to provide teachers with additional acknowledgement that Auckland is an expensive place to live.
"Cities like London need to do it and have done it for some time," Spoonley said.
HORTICULTURE AND AGRICULTURE
The Ministry of Social Development (MSD) declared a regional labour shortage earlier this week.
MSD East Coast regional commissioner Annie Aranui said by declaring a labour market shortage, all growers within the Hawke’s Bay area would be able to employ fruit pickers who were not necessarily New Zealand jobseekers, and were on visitor permits.
"The weather this year has meant the upcoming apple crop has exceeded all expectations in terms of the size of the fruit. This great for the industry and for the region, but with a short three weeks to pick and pack an extra two million cases of fruit, the industry needs more help."
MSD aimed to proactively provide training and upskilling support for people in the horticultural sector, she said.
"We’re providing all the people we can to help through Work and Income, but more are needed and where an industry so important to this region has a clear and immediate need, we need to back them."
Spoonley said 30 or 40 years ago, most horticultural jobs would have been filled by locals doing seasonal work, but there are no longer enough locals to meet the demand.
"There are simply not enough locals who are either prepared to do that work or who are available to do that work," he said.
"In the past three decades, what we’ve done is change some of the requirements around benefits, so it’s not so easy to move into work off the benefit and then back onto a benefit. So that discourages people from considering short-term jobs because there’s a stand-down period. There’s a period where, having completed the work, you can’t access the benefit.
"That demand is increasingly being met by the recognised seasonal employment scheme, and that brings workers in from the Pacific to work for a precise period."
Immigrant workers were now particularly essential in the Hawke’s Bay and the South Island, Spoonley said.
"In parts of the South Island, about half of the dairy workers are migrant workers. Particularly immigrants from the Philippines," he said.
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
The IT industry would struggle in New Zealand if it could not access skilled immigrant IT workers, Spoonley said.
"In the big cities, particularly Auckland, there are some industries like IT, where we simply don’t produce enough graduates and we don’t have enough trained people."