Labour shortages « NZ Conservative

Western recruitment agencies undermining health care in the third world

April 21, 2008

Last week the Press had a couple of articles about Filipino nurses working as low paid care workers in Christchurch. According to the Press, trained Filipinos nurses are paying large sums of money to recruitment agencies to secure jobs in the city’s hospitals, only to end up in working in nursing homes.

To register as nurses in New Zealand they first have to pass an International English Language Test examination, which is proving to be a major stumbling block for many applicants. Since the Philippines, like most developing countries, has a looming shortage of doctors and nurses, which is arguably more serious than ours, it seems a waste of human potential for them to be working as low paid, semi-skilled workers in a western country rather than as skilled nurses in their home country, where they know the local language and customs.

Care work is also one of the lowest paid professions in the country, with most workers getting paid slightly above the minimum wage of $12 per hour. Before trying to strip the developing world of it’s medical staff, it might be an idea to try and offer slightly better work conditions for native workers.

In a sign of the times, the article also revealed that Filipinos were the largest group of net migrants from Asia last year, with 6143 immigrants, up from 5065 the previous year.

1 Comment | Health, Immigration, Labour shortages | Permalink
Posted by mikecourtman

NZ wine growers and labour shortages

March 19, 2008

According to the Press (“Wine growers fear shortage of workers,” Saturday, March 15) Marlborough’s wine growers say their may be a significant shortage of workers for this winter’s pruning season due to bureaucratic issues with the government’s new Recognised Seasonal Employer Scheme.

Under the new scheme Malborough growers are entitled to employ workers from the Pacific Islands, who are pre-selected by the department of labour, to fill seasonal labour shortages. The growers claim it is taking too much time to get the workers processed and in the meantime experienced workers from other countries are having to leave as their visas run out.

Whether the claims about problems with the scheme are accurate or not I don’t know, but the viticulture industry doesn’t seem very clear about where these “experienced workers” are coming from, or what sort of a risk they pose in terms of overstaying.

In a previous Press article it was stated experienced workers had came from countries such as “Indonesia, Thailand and the Czech Republic,” which seems an odd assortment of countries (I would have thought it unlikely many workers from a country like the Czech Republic would bother to take up seasonal work in New Zealand when the wages here are likely to be only marginally higher than at home).

On the other hand, its obvious that workers from Indonesia would be keen on working for New Zealand wages as wage rates in Indonesia are presently very low. Among the numerous problems with employing workers from very poor countries is they are likely to work at much lower rates than locals and are much more likely to overstay than workers from middle income countries.

Arguably there is a reasonable case for allowing experienced workers from middle income countries to come back for a couple of seasons, but this should not be extended to workers from third world countries who pose a much higher risk of overstaying. This seems like a reasonable compromise situation which would help improve the image of the rural sector in terms of immigration issues. It’s also important to take into account issues of cultural compatibility in the event workers do overstay and end up living among the local population. In this regard workers from impoverished Muslim countries pose the greatest risk at present.

In my view, prospective workers from pro-western regions such as Eastern Europe, and middle-income South American countries, such as Uruguay and Argentina, should get preference over those from third world nations like Indonesia.

2 Comments | Labour shortages, NZ economy | Permalink
Posted by mikecourtman

A producerist approach to labour shortages

March 12, 2008

If global warming is the great bogeyman of left-liberals, then the conservative equivalent seems to be slowing birth rates and population decline. If discussion on many mainstream conservative blogs is anything to go, the West is close to collapse due to its low birth rates and must let in increasing numbers of non-western immigrants in the interests of economic survival.

Sure declining birth rates are a major concern but you don’t come across quite the same level of panic on ethno-nationalist sites, since ethno-nationalists don’t tend to support free market capitalism with its market populist system of labour allocations.

For communitarians and nationalists, the market is a tool to serve the people, not an end in itself. If low birth rates really are imperiling western civilisation, then we need to consider intervening in the free market to ensure that scarcer labour supplies are directed away from non-essential service-industry activities, and towards areas which are essential to long-term economic sustainability.

Many people certainly have short memories, less than 15 years ago, the English-speaking West was grapling with high unemployment caused by massive de-industrialisation. The main concern back then was figuring out what over qualified university graduates and ex-industrial workers were going to do, and many ended up in low-wage service industry jobs or dubious post-modern occupations like counseling and public relations.

Today, we know longer have to worry about creating occupations and in theory can focus on directly labour to where it is most needed. However, in the meantime most conservatives and right liberals seem to have forgotten that we have large numbers of workers engaged in low productivity service jobs and that we are continuing to train more workers for such occupations.

Here in New Zealand for example, we have an excessively large retail sector for the size of our economy, and it would be advantageous if the government encouraged more workers into other sectors by restricting applications for new mega stores and shopping malls.

There are also some sectors of the service economy with negative social pathologies which we can consider shutting down altogether or at least severely restricting. If we have a serious labour shortage then prostitution should be made illegal, and gambling should be tightly restricted.

There is also a good case for restricting planning applications for fast food restaurants which encourage obesity and ill-health, as well as diverting labour from other, more productive fields like manufacturing and horticulture.

The liberal right will argue that the government shouldn’t interfere in the economy to direct workers into particular industries, however we already do this anyway through selective funding of public education and there’s nothing particularly radical about trying to manipulate the labour supply in the interests of economic sustainablity. Indeed, most East Asian countries already follow a relatively producerist approach to training and education, with little public funding for service industry based training.

Through the tertiary education system the government has considerable power to affect the future labour supply and there is plenty of fat to trim: entry can be restricted to sports, recreation, liberal arts and generic business courses while incentives to encourage students to take practical and technical courses which address key labour shortages can be further increased.

The relative success of Labour’s Modern Apprenticeships initative show’s how quickly things can be improved where there is political will and proper liaison with the private sector. One of the strengths of using a corporatist/producerist approach to help deal with labour shortages is that it can have a significant impact in a short space of time.

While it will take 30 years for a baby-boom to have any impact on the labour supply, an aggressive program to direct labour towards essential services and export industries could bear serious fruit in 5-10 years.

1 Comment | Demography, Labour shortages | Permalink
Posted by mikecourtman

NZ teacher shortage still concentrated in Auckland

January 11, 2008

Although education providers frequently claim New Zealand has a shortage of qualified primary teachers, most recent South Island graduates are struggling to find work.

According to Ministry of Education figures published in the Press, the average employment rate for Christchurch graduates between 2001 and 2006 was just 34 percent, compared with 48 percent for Wellington and 68 percent for Auckland.

Teacher shortages in areas like South Auckland are nothing new. In the same way New Zealand graduates on their OE often end up teaching in the worst schools in the UK, young British teachers are snapped up by the rougher schools in Auckland and Hamilton to replace domestic graduates who would rather work somewhere else.

Teachers may profess to have liberal views, but most of them still don’t appear to be too keen on living in expensive, overcrowded cities, with high crime rates and diverse classes of difficult to control students. In today’s, laissez-faire, kid-centric society, it’s hard enough to control a mono-cultural, high socio-economic class of kids, let alone a multi-cultural group of children from rough backgrounds.

In contrast, Canterbury has a more stable workforce because it is regarded as a decent place to live. Living costs are moderate, traffic is tolerable, schools are generally OK, and while crime is increasing, it has not yet reached the rates experienced in the Upper North Island. This high quality of life means that Canterbury tends to suffer less from skilled labour shortages than the North Island, despite the fact that its population is aging faster.

Meanwhile, Auckland’s rapidly growing, multi-cultural population, is failing to generate enough of its own skilled workers, and is having to import workers from other regions to maintain basic services. Not only does Auckland have a teacher shortage, but is also has a significant shortage of tradesmen, if pay rates are anything to go by.

Since 2002 the Labour government has been trying to address Auckland’s labour shortages by bringing in more British and English-speaking South Asian immigrants. However, the problem with this approach is many of the British immigrants don’t want to stay in Auckland (can’t really blame them), and band-aid immigration is doing nothing to alleviate accommodation costs and traffic problems.

It’s increasingly clear that if Auckland expects to maintain a first world infrastructure, it’s going to have to train more of its Polynesian and East Asian citizens to fill the vacancies left by a shrinking Caucasian population.

Leave a Comment » | Education, Labour shortages, NZ economy | Permalink
Posted by mikecourtman

Polynesian Guest Workers

October 31, 2006

The Government’s new proposal to bring in more Polynesian guest workers has gained the support of New Zealand First while drawing criticism from National.

The proposal allows for up to 5000 guest workers from Polynesia to fill seasonal labour shortages in viticulture and horticulture.

Given New Zealand First’s focus on export led growth, it seems that it prefers a guest worker programme to the idea of increased Polynesian immigration in the future. National, showing unusual concern for the wider public interest, points out that the country has up to 20,000 over stayers at any one time and that there is nothing to stop the workers from running off to get lost in the big city.

Personally, I have mixed views on guest worker programmes. I prefer them to large-scale immigration initiatives but realise that there is a lot of potential for abuse by both employers and workers.

This is an important issue that is getting nowhere near enough media attention.

3 Comments | Immigration, Labour shortages, NZ economy | Permalink
Posted by mikecourtman

Dealing with Seasonal Labour Shortages

October 31, 2006

Although guest worker programmes, for better or worse, may provide a temporary solution to New Zealand’s seasonal labour problem, they are not a realistic, long- term solution. Large scale guest worker programmes can have big social costs and its citizens, not employers, that end up footing the bill.

The Country needs to take a serious look at how it can increase productivity and encourage more locals to do seasonal work.

Firstly, treat farmers’ complaints about labour shortages with a little skepticism.

Apparently, Australia has a major shortage of seasonal labour but it also has some very inefficient farms.

I once picked pears on a farm in Victoria, which were destined for the SPC canary. Since the pears were picked before they were ripe, they could have picked using a cherry picker. Instead we walked around using heavy steel ladders and so took four times as long as we should have – not surprisingly, by Australian standards (and even New Zealand standards for that matter) we were paid very poorly.

The blunt reality is that if small time farms can’t invest in suitable equipment they should sell out to bigger farms with bigger pockets.

Admittedly, some crops bruise easily and it is necessary to carefully hand-pick them, and this is certainly the case with apples. Interestingly, pay rates for apple picking are not that bad – the problem is that not that many people available at the right time to harvest them.

One thing that could be done is to change the holiday times for Polytechnics in horticultural regions like Nelson and Hawke’s Bay. If students had their holidays in the autumn, it would make it much easier for farmers to find labour at harvest time.

Although NZ has a lower unemployment rate than Australia, we have a much stingier visa scheme for young workers from Europe and North America. For example, while New Zealanders on two year working visas make a significant contribution to the UK economy, British and Irish backpackers on six-month visas in NZ simply don’t have enough time to do much work.

If you want to get young backpackers to work, you have to give them enough time to use up their savings, and pounds and euros go a long way in New Zealand. The reason that Kiwis in the UK have a reputation as good workers is because they are usually desperate for money after a few weeks of arriving in rip-off London.

If labour shortages are as bad as the Government says, we should start a new scheme for one-two year visas for European and American travellers under 40 with good English skills.

However, people on visas don’t vote, and at present New Zealand’s two main political parties are more interested in importing voters and wealthy house hunters than in directly addressing labour needs.

Leave a Comment » | Immigration, Labour shortages | Permalink
Posted by mikecourtman

Immigration Industry

July 9, 2006

As someone with a strong distaste for spin and misinformation a recent trawl around internet sites dealing with immigration to Australasia has provided me with plenty to get annoyed about.

Under the topic of ‘immigration consultants’ on Google, I found an Australian gem at‘http://www.migrationint.com.au which outlines various types of jobs through which people can enter Australia under the skilled migrant category. Under the categories of ‘associate professionals’ and ‘skilled professionals’ were expected job types like ‘plumber, ‘civil engineer’, ‘roofer’ and ‘nurse’. However, I wasn’t expecting to see jobs like ‘real estate salesman’, ‘archivist’, ‘librarian’, ‘acupuncturist’, ‘museum or art gallery technician’, ‘drug and alcohol counsellor’, ‘chef’ and ‘TV Journalist’.

Well, to anyone from overseas who expects to get a job in a library, museum, art gallery or archive in Australia or N.Z I can assure that there are plenty of qualified local graduates for such positions who can’t find jobs in these fields. Jobs in archives are particularly difficult to get into, despite paying about the same as many unskilled manual jobs. Similarly, unless you are a top level clinical psychologist don’t expect to get a job in counselling. Also, given the competition for positions on journalism courses we should be able to recruit enough TV journalists. As for acupuncture well, we have enough new age, anti-scientific, types as it is without importing more.

Even in some areas where there is a shortage of workers is it questionable whether Aust and N.Z should actually be importing more workers. For example, there is apparently a shortage of chiefs, but there is also a surplus of unprofitable restaurants. Do we really want to support unprofitable industries that pay poor wages?

Admittedly, official government sponsored sites are more realistic and hard-nosed about labour shortages but even here there are some questionable listings. For example, on the NZ government site http://www.immigration.govt.nz/, most of the skilled job listings are for technical and skilled manual sectors like construction and medicine. However, there were also listings for furniture manufacturing. Now, given that Chinese competition is rapidly closing down many cabinet-making firms isn’t it a bit disingenuous to lure immigrants on the promise of work in the furniture industry. This smacks of the short-term dishonesty of the British bureaucrats who bought Pakistani immigrants into Yorkshire in the 1960s to work in unprofitable mills that were soon to close. If jobs in industries like furniture-making are advertised then they should at least be listed as temporary positions.

Under the ‘Investor category’, on the NZ government’s immigration website, conditions appear to be pretty stringent for would be immigrants with tough English language and minimum capital requirements. There are no requirements though, that investments must be put into productive activities that generate jobs for New Zealand workers. Should people be allowed to become NZ citizens just because they have sufficient capital to buy their way into the country? Where a country has loose restrictions on investment based immigration then organised criminals are more likely to establish themselves. A laissez-faire approach to immigrant investment also tends to encourage illegal immigration since some investors can use the opportunity to import cheap labour from their country of origin and employ them in businesses such as restaurants, brothels and garment shops.

Although the shift towards skilled-based immigration and tougher English language requirements in Australasian immigration policy is a positive move immigration consultants don’t appear to be communicating national labour needs to perspective immigrants. Similarly, central government is also not immune from spin and still appears to have a blasé attitude to immigration and investment.