Te Awamutu woman Nina Singh is living the dream. Agricultural contracting was never part of plan A, but maybe it should have been.
Singh, a former primary school teacher, started driving a tractor with Holmes and Chittick at the end of 2020, and has been steadily adding more implements as she gets more skilled. When not driving, there is time in the depot using tools and looking after the gear. This week she has been raking for hay on farms at Pukeatua.
“It’s pretty empowering. Especially, you know, as a woman, I never ever thought I’d be able to drive a tractor and do all that stuff,” she says.
“I love it. Absolutely love it.”
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The numbers show Singh is in good company, with job ads booming in the Waikato. It’s a bonanza for job seekers spoiled for choice, but presents a headache for employers facing constraint on growth and pressure on wages.
When Covid hit, Singh, 31, had just quit her teaching job. She was about to get married and then she and her husband were going to travel.
Travel was scuttled, and Singh was out of a job. She didn’t want to go back to teaching, and had grown up on a farm so applied for a range of jobs in the agricultural sector. The rejections followed. Seek.co.nz figures show job vacancy advertisements dropped sharply during the first lockdown, and Singh may also have been competing against a larger than usual pool of jobseekers.
Then she saw a job advertised at Holmes and Chittick. This time she got lucky. They said they would support her through a programme for training people to drive tractors.
AgDrive, at Hautapu, was set up during lockdown when the owners could see the tap being turned off for skilled contracting drivers arriving from the Northern Hemisphere for the Kiwi season. The two-week course was invaluable. “I wouldn’t have known, apart from where the steering wheel is and the key, anything more about a tractor.”
It will be full on during the upcoming maize season, and then in winter she will probably help out on machine maintenance from time to time, while also potentially lending a hand on the family farm at Pukeatua.
“I work longer and harder than I did in teaching, but because it’s so rewarding, it doesn’t feel like work.”
Singh has made Covid work for her, and almost two years on the signs are that others are as well, as a labour shortage puts jobseekers in the driver’s seat. In some cases, that sees employers offering cash sign-on inducements.
Senga Allen, of Everest People, which offers a recruitment service, says the primary sector, construction and nursing are among those struggling to fill vacancies.
“There just is not enough good people around, employers are getting frustrated, employees are perhaps using this as an opportunity to look for new roles that might pay more, give more flexibility or benefits.”
She says some job candidates are asking about working from home for part of the week, while Everest has a couple of employer clients who are offering a sign-on bonus of $1000 cash up front.
Allen expects 2022, with limited immigration, to be no better. “The optimist in me would say, let’s see what the next six months looks like, but it depends on Omicron,” she says. “I don’t think this year is going to be any easier to find people, put it that way.”
The opportunities for jobseekers are borne out by job ad figures from both Seek and Trade Me.
Trade Me figures released this week show Waikato job listings increased by 25 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2021 (October-December) compared with the same period a year earlier. The only sector to see a decrease was the hospitality and tourism sector, with a 3 per cent drop.
Meanwhile, Seek figures show Waikato region job ads increased by 3 percent from November to December. They were also up 51.9 percent on December two years ago, before Covid arrived.
Trade Me also says the average salary in the Waikato for the quarter was $64,106, which was 6 per cent up on the same period a year earlier.
In Waikato, growth constrained by labour shortages, and upward pressure on wages, are consistent themes across sectors. A picture emerges of workers putting in longer shifts and of senior staff getting “on the tools” to help out.
With the maize harvesting season looming, Singh’s boss, Paula Holmes, is looking to treble staff numbers from their core five permanents. Given the labour shortage, that won’t be easy. She and her business partner have been driving, and she says they’ve had one machine parked up unused all season. Having to juggle looking after young children, organising the business and driving has been “pretty tough”.
“This would be the hardest year I’ve had personally, with trying to drive and juggle everything. It’s been hard going, for sure.”
She makes a further point about the absence of skilled staff from the Northern Hemisphere.
“When they’re here, they spend all their money, whether it be doing the tourist activities, or in the pub or whatever,” she says. “So it’s a widespread thing that people are missing out on, not just us having the lack of operators.
“I think it is what everyone else is going through, as well, to be honest, just the lack of skilled labour in the country is the biggest issue. Even finding the young people to train up, [they] just aren’t there either.”
Singh, however, has been a find. Holmes says she has a “fantastic” attitude and has taken to the role like a duck to water.
Behind the headline figures of high job ads, and historically low unemployment, is a slightly more complex picture.
Waikato Regional Council principal economist Blair Keenan says the working age population has grown more rapidly than the number of jobs, while the unemployment rate has stayed steady. That discrepancy can be explained by people leaving the labour market altogether – effectively, ruling themselves out of the statistics. Given there are plenty of jobs available, the “great resignation”, as it has been termed, is likely to involve workers quitting their jobs and looking at other options, rather than giving up in discouragement.
There has also been a decline in the working age population of 20 to 24-year-olds in the region from 37,020 in 2020, down to about 26,000 in the third quarter of 2021. They are traditionally a mobile group, but it’s unclear where they have gone considering overseas travel is out of the picture, Keenan says. There is a clear potential impact on employers looking for young people with limited experience.
A survey conducted by regional development agency Te Waka last year identified construction, manufacturing, primary industries and transport as the four sectors with the greatest skill shortages.
Perhaps surprisingly, Keenan says employers identified a lack of skilled Kiwis as a greater issue than a lack of skilled migrant workers.
How serious is the labour shortage?
“I think the survey data is telling us that it’s pretty serious. And if we think about things like construction, we know one of the big economic and social issues facing not just the region, but the whole country, is around housing. Now, there’s probably a list as long as your arm of things you should be doing about housing. But having a labour force that can meet demand is definitely one of them.”
In the construction sector, one Hamilton firm which has been trying to fill a vacancy for up to a year is Paua Architects. Business development manager Phil Mackay says this week they think they may have finally plugged the gap for an intermediate to senior architect.
They always get applications from overseas for vacancies, but had very few suitable ones from New Zealand for the current job, he says. “We’re not interested in hiring someone who’s not in the country. Generally speaking, they’re not familiar with New Zealand construction methods.”
The lengthy delay has been an unwelcome constraint at a time of growth while the sector has been booming.
Mackay thinks the uncertain times may have contributed to the lack of applications, with people hesitant to move.
Company-X director David Hallett says his tech firm, with just under 60 staff, is dealing with the loss of skilled immigrant workers by doubling down on training graduates and juniors. Nevertheless, the inability to hire senior migrant staff is inhibiting growth.
“We have to be quite judicious in terms of the work that we’re choosing to do,” he says.
Company-X is paying its staff more, and also offers flexibility which sees some staff working remotely from the likes of Wanaka in the South Island and even overseas.
Raglan man Kaleb James is managing director of Stafford Engineering in Hamilton, which has been resilient in the face of Covid. James says they have always had a focus on training younger staff and aren’t reliant on migrant labour. “I think the way that we’ve set about training our workforce has given us an advantage.”
The upward pressure on wage rates to retain staff has been “massive”, he says. They’ve appointed six people in the past 12 months, four of them additional, bringing their overall number to 65.
James is also co-director of Orca Eatery and Bar in Raglan, where there is a contrasting story. He says the hospo business is a “pretty tough, uphill battle” at the moment. Not only is there the challenge of sourcing vaccinated staff, but they are missing the working tourists who normally help them manage summer peak loads. The increase in the minimum wage has also contributed.
“Everyone out here in Raglan is struggling,” he says. Like Holmes he points to the wider impact. “What that’s meant for Raglan as a town is that we haven’t been able to service the people who come in here to actually spend money.”
The outlook is dependent on the impact of Omicron, with James saying the Australian experience suggests they could be operating with 30 percent less staff. Between that and possible future lockdowns, it will have a big impact on their ability to continue operating, like everyone in the game. “It’s tough, a tough, tough place to be in.”
The story repeats in the health sector, with Louis Fick, the chief executive officer of Tamahere Eventide and Atawhai Assisi, saying both nurses and caregivers are in short supply. “It puts the existing staff under a huge amount of pressure.”
There has always been a flow of international nurses from the aged care sector to the higher-paying DHBs as they gain residency. That becomes a problem when new staff can’t get into the country.
Now they are planning for Omicron, with the possibility of staff off sick. Among other things, they are looking at 12-hour shifts and management working on the floor, he says.
Chris Lewis, Federated Farmers immigration and employment spokesperson, says the skills shortage reflects a booming economy across both town and country.
“[If] people want to leave school or change jobs, there’s a lot of job security out there right now, and a lot of good paying jobs. On the other hand, when you don’t have fully staffed teams, it can lead to productivity shortages.”
The last two years have been challenging, as it has become harder to iron out peaks and troughs with immigration. The “shambles” of the MIQ system has made it even harder to keep businesses fully staffed with competent teams, he says.
“It can’t be good for people’s mental well-being, all that extra stress,” he says. “We can’t have a third year of intense pressure on our workforce. It doesn’t help retention. It doesn’t help training, it doesn’t help a lot of things.”
But the labour shortage isn’t going away any time soon. “This is a subject that’s going to be ongoing for the next 12 months, you know, right through the year,” Lewis says. “There’s going to be multiple articles written on this, I bet you.”
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