KEY POINTS:
Skilled building tradespeople are turning up at the doors of temporary labour hire companies as nine years of a buoyant job market turn sour.
Official figures released yesterday show that employment dropped by 29,000 in the first three months of this year - the biggest drop on a
seasonally adjusted basis in any three-month period for 19 years.
The unemployment rate rose from 3.4 per cent to 3.6 per cent, although this is the sixth-lowest in the developed world.
Labour hire company Allied Workforce said the shortages that still dogged the construction industry even six months ago had disappeared.
Managing director Simon Hull said: "We have seen an increase in applicants for jobs, particularly from the construction sector, in skilled and semi-skilled people who have been put out of work."
Council of Trade Unions economist Peter Conway said he had heard of employers at the bottom of the South Island who used to advertise for carpenters and get five applicants if they were lucky and were now getting "closer to 100".
But the picture remains mixed, with the farming sector still buoyant as a result of near-record world prices for dairy products and meat.
Even Building Trades Union Auckland organiser Peter Devlin said tradespeople being laid off in the building industry were being snapped up in infrastructure work on new motorways and bridges.
"I have had three redundancies this year," he said. "I'm 62, almost 63, and I know what it's like to have a downturn coming. I worked for another union and I had redundancies every day. That was in the Roger Douglas days.
"This is just a bit of a glitch at the moment. Let's hope it stays that way."
Employers and Manufacturers Association Northern chief executive Alasdair Thompson said the drop in employment was much bigger than he expected and he suspected an error, either in the latest figures or in the surprisingly high employment figures reported late last year.
"There would be a reduction, I don't think there's any surprise about that. What I am surprised about is the size of the reduction," he said.
The figures are based on a sample survey of 15,000 households and Statistics NZ said the total employment figures had a margin of error of plus or minus 21,600.
On an annual basis, job growth during last year means that employment in the first three months of this year was still only 5300 (0.2 per cent) lower than in the same period last year.
Employment dropped by 11,300 (6.1 per cent) in construction and by 5900 (2 per cent) in manufacturing, but rose by 6600 (4.3 per cent) in farming, forestry and fishing.
Fulltime employment dropped by 0.3 per cent for men and by 1 per cent for women, while part-time work kept rising for both genders.
Mr Conway said the drop in fulltime work for women might be partly due to higher family support under the Government's Working for Families policy, which has enabled some two-parent families to let one parent stay home with the children.
Almost 1 per cent of the population aged 15 and over has dropped out of the labour force in the past year, reducing the proportion either in work or seeking work from 68.6 per cent a year ago to 67.7 per cent now.
This has helped to hold down the unemployment rate which, at 3.6 per cent on a seasonally adjusted basis, is still slightly below the figure of 3.7 per cent a year ago.