Using overseas workers to prevent shortfalls.

and how are we supposed to get work? WINZ has now got serious conditions on not only unemployment but also DPB and sickness, if we (as I am on DPB this is me too) can't find work no matter how demeaning, or travel cost or in my case childcare required, there is a limited amount of time and little leniency before they send you to an agency(part of WINZ) who give you a couple of choices then if you don't comply cut your benefit by half then after i think 3 months if you haven't got work you get cut off completely. And our current government is trying to alleviate child poverty? how does this help?

I believe a new employment category should be created which is exempt from the requirements of minimum wage.

My view is that there is a group of society either in prison or on the benefit who want to work, they want to upskill, they pose no risk to society (for those in prison) which could be used to fill a labour gap.

If we developed a system of compliance where the Ministry of Social Development took their $5000 employers scheme further and introduced flexibility around the restrictions of the Employment Relations Act.

By this I mean - temporary exemption from minimum wage in a way that works as long as the person was learning how to operate within this labour framework.

We could make things like outsources call centres (India/Phillipines) etc obsolete by creating a training scheme where while training beneficiaries would be subsidised and those serving sentences for crimes which are appropriate would be paid penal rates for the opportunity to train within this scheme.

All schemes would be short term with the goal of job placement upon graduation.

I agree because there is a massive shortfall of skilled labour here. There are many students coming out of colleges with degrees pertaining to sectors in NZ but their skillsets are still lower than international standards.

But in saying I agree, I don't believe the govt has the system running properly as for an employer getting those skilled workers into the country is nearer to impossible than believing Harry Potter movies could be true.

I think a lot of work needs to be done at govt level to make that system work properly.

I believe that there are enough New Zealanders to do the work, but most New Zealanders won't put up with low wages, poor contracts, and sometimes even worse treatment, that the seasonal workers will. The solution then, is to raise the minimum wage, and work toward a UBI, generally improve the welfare and working environment so New Zealanders want those jobs. Technology also has its role to play. For example, farm automation is big business overseas with Lely and Delavel both offering sophisticated milking robot technologies which are only beginning to be used here. Perhaps the government should be considering subsidising the automation and development of automation for the dairy sector, as importing workers may just create more problems than they solve. Milking robots would take the burden off of a lot of generational family farms... As for tourism in Queenstown... if the businesses can't survive without cheaper foreign labour then I suggest their business models should evolve. I dispute that we are short of experience in the tourism or dairy sector, or that we don't have the capacity to upgrade the skills of the native New Zealanders, but for making the jobs attractive to them.

My slant on this is that we shouldn't be able to bring in workers from overseas because in doing so we destroy our own labour market.

If somebody doesn't want to work for $15 then try $16 etc..., and so on and so forth.

If it becomes impossible for someone to run their business at a profit due to labour restrictions then they should either shut their business down, or have a massive rethink about what they are trying to achieve and how.

I'm not talking rocket scientists here. In most cases these are low paid tourism and fruit picking jobs. It isn't that we don't have the work force, it's because we don't make it worth their while.

@blairrobson1 says that we should have a new category of employment and get rid of the minimum wage and that just seems like a race to the bottom to me. Four million people are at a disadvantage against four billion, especially if the four billion are paid lower wages.

I am also unsure about this group that want to work. Maybe they do, but I suspect we might have to make it worthwhile. I don't think creating another subclass of workers in NZ is going to make people want to work, or if they are forced, to work better.

(There is a weird idea in all of this that jobs such as apple picking aren't skilled labour. You try climbing a ladder all day and picking apples at height and then carefully getting them down and into the bin without any damage. That is a skill, and quite a hard one.)

Yes, we could make call centres in the Philippines go broke. But, only by making ourselves into the Philippines. Not my idea of a nice place to live. To many people, to many problems.

The last paragraph of @blairrobson1 post is the killer for me. If a business has a choice between hiring a New Zealander because they are cheap, but after a while they become expensive, or a foreign labourer who will always be cheap then why would they hire the New Zealander? They would just have to retrain each one after each graduation whereas the foreign worker would be a constant.

@grantkeinzley says that we have a massive shortfall of skilled labour.......why? Is this is an education sector problem? Is it an employer problem? Do the employers not train, just employ? Why don't we fix the problem instead of fixing the system to bring in outside labour to fix the shortfall?

@tane why? Is this is an education sector problem? Is it an employer problem?

Personally I think it is a NZ problem, the country is so far behind the rest of the world that all the NZQA certs in the world doesn't mean crap to an employer wanting to produce global standard products. So the shortfall in skilled labour means shortfall in people able to do what the rest of the world has been doing for years.

@grantkeinzley Can you give me an example of the sort of global standard product you mean? Do you think it is only in the tech sector or are we facing this evenly across all sectors? I know what it is like to look for a tech job and find that all the vacancies specify expertise in five languages and five years experience but this is faced all over the world as far as I know. How do we get it wrong so badly that after schooling people for fifteen years they are unemployable.

With 6% unemployment there aren't any shortfalls - the businesses just aren't paying enough. It also has to do with the fact that workers brought in from offshore are easier to scam than NZ workers. This is proven by the stories coming out in the MSM of people who are living in atrocious conditions and getting less than the minimum wage.

https://rdln.wordpress.com/2015/03/07/so-much-for-bosses-support-for-the-free-market/
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2015/03/06/the-political-economy-of-low-wage-labour/

@colinengland agreed..... somewhat counterintuitively the policys of unemployment generate skilled labour shortage. along with corporatisation of tertiary education and the student debt

@grantkeinzley @tane apprenticeships run by polytech in conjunction with employers giving real experience in real jobs ending in paid employment, would fix this education part of the problem, and wasn't that how it used to be. If we also had UBI then it would put less strain on the employer as well

I have spent hours looking for jobs that fit my situation and experience but nothing in my area and the jobs that are they all are looking for 2 years experience, how do you get the experience if you can't afford to pay for training or have an inside r to get you in?