Lean pickings for the locals

Etimani Baulo has come from his home in Apia, Samoa to pick fruit for Kerifresh in Kerikeri. Picture / Richard Robinson

For 11 months, Hira Reihana worked for Kerikeri's biggest fruitgrowing company, Kerifresh. The 19-year-old from the meatworks town of Moerewa, 25 minutes down the road, worked in the nursery and in the orchards on bin rates that earned him around $9 an hour.

"It's like slave labour because it's $40 a mandarin bin and sometimes it can take you hours to fill that," he says.

Despite the pay, he would be working there still if the job had not ended in the off-season a couple of months ago.

"They just decided that was it. They pretty much said there was no more work," he says.

"I have been looking for work since then, but a lot of their positions are already full with backpackers."

And now Samoans. Despite Northland's chronic unemployment, Kerifresh has just hired 20 workers direct from Samoa for their permanent workforce, mainly to prune and pick lemons which ripen throughout the year.

The company has paid their airfares, although it will take the money back in deductions from their wages. It has put them up in a school camp and is bringing them to the lemon orchards in vans until it can find houses for them to rent with their families.

"It's not right, I don't reckon," Reihana says.

Cliff Colquhoun, manager of Kaitaia's Community Business and Employment Centre (CBEC), which supplies 15 workers a day to the Kerikeri orchards, says the decision to hire Samoans is "an excuse not to confront the issues" involved in hiring more local people.

To Tamati Patara, who runs a truck-driving course for unemployed workers in nearby Kaikohe, the move is "a big disappointment" and "another nail in our coffin".

Adam Smith, 20, a Hokianga youth who has done some fruit-picking but is now on a life-skills course at Kaikohe's Te Kotahitanga E Mahi Kaha Trust, says it's not fair to lend people airfares to fly from Samoa but not to help locals who need cars to drive half-an-hour to Kerikeri.

"Would we get the right to buy a car and pay that back on hire-purchase?" he asks.

His boss, trust manager Phil Marsh, encourages his trainees into the orchards as a first step on the employment ladder.

"To bring people from another country to fill the jobs - what is it saying about our society?" he asks.

It's a good question. Unemployment has dropped dramatically in Northland, as elsewhere, over the past five years. But in March there were still 15,838 people aged 18 to 64 on welfare benefits, a bigger share of the working-aged population (14.7 per cent) than anywhere else except the Bay of Plenty.

Just over a third of them (5685) are on the domestic purposes benefit and another third (5662) are on sickness and invalid benefits. But that still leaves 3527 on the dole and 964 on independent youth, widows and emergency benefits.

Kerikeri orchardists have a base year-round workforce of about 350 and need about 1000 extra workers at this time of year, when kiwifruit, mandarins and persimmons all need to be picked in a mad six-week rush.

It's a big ask, but Kerifresh says about a third of its seasonal workers are foreign backpackers, and another sixth work for contractors who follow seasonal work around the country. It needs to get the remaining 500 or so locally.

Few workers are available in Kerikeri itself, which has become a boom town. Kerifresh, which accounts for half the local fruitgrowing industry, has doubled its peak labour requirement in the past five years. Numbers on the dole in the Kerikeri district have plummeted in those five years from 743 to just 73, most of whom are over 60.

Whole new subdivisions are being built for lifestylers and retirees from Auckland, wealthy expatriates and celebrities seeking a place in the sun and a sea view.

A new supermarket and a branch of The Warehouse have opened in the past two years, mopping up any remaining unemployed.

But there are still 238 people on the dole in the Kawakawa district and 418 in the Kaikohe district, both about half-an-hour away, and 775 in the Kaitaia district.

Colquhoun, whose 15 fruit-pickers leave Kaitaia at 6.30am and get home at 6.30pm, says many more would make the 75-minute trip each way to Kerikeri if given the chance.

Yet Kerifresh says it went to Samoa only after exhausting every possible avenue to recruit locally.

Last year Work and Income hired buses to bring unemployed people in from Kaeo, Kawakawa and the Hokianga. Those who refused had their dole cut.

"We held recruitment seminars in all the towns through the mid-north," says citrus manager Andrew Harty. "It just didn't pay off. Work and Income spent most of their operational budget in the six weeks. They pulled out the plug and did everything they could. It was a failure."

Work and Income Northland regional commissioner Marama Wiki says some of the Hokianga workers got other jobs, and the numbers dwindled.

"It was just the logistics - a 40-seater with only 10 people getting on," she says.

Part of the problem is that an unemployed person will always take a permanent job with long-term prospects, if available, in preference to short-term seasonal work which is made uncertain by weather even at its peak.

This year frustrated backpackers had to cool their heels, earning nothing while shelling out for beds at places such as Kerikeri's Hone Heke Lodge, because our cold, early summer made the mandarins ripen two weeks later than expected.

Then, when it was suddenly all on this week, contractors such as Waimarie Reihana of Kaikohe-based Labour Link had a bit of a scramble to find workers waiting on standby to start work.

"A number of our workers have given us cellphone numbers," she says. "But their phones are often not turned on, or they haven't got any credit, or they are out of range, or they have given us a cuzzie's number or the neighbour's or nana's number and the person didn't know they were the contact.

"Some recruits have been waiting six weeks to start work, and the season is only for six weeks. We're faced with the challenges of training people to pick to the right size and colour, and at a speed that allows them to make at least the minimum wage rate."

LOW pay is a problem too, especially combined with high transport costs from outlying districts.

Dave Murphy, now a bartender at Dusty's in Kaikohe, has harvested oranges, kiwifruit, squash and kumara and worked in the packing sheds, travelling in his own car.

"I'd spend $40 on gas," he says. "But they only pay the minimum wage. Nobody wants to work for that when they can get $150 on the dole."

Dave Peri, 40, a father of six who is sitting his heavy transport licence to get an earthmoving job on a road gang, sees no point in earning just the minimum wage of $9.50 an hour, or $380 a week, before tax.

After tax, that's $306 a week. The dole for a married couple is $280.96 a week, not counting top-ups for children or accommodation.

"They offer you $20 on top of the benefit. It's an insult to Maori," Peri says.

The calculation looks better if you can earn what Kerifresh says is its actual average wage of $12 an hour. That's $480 a week before tax, or $384 after tax, a good $63 a week above the married dole rate even after allowing $40 for petrol.

And for single people such as Hira Reihana, low pay is even less of a problem. The single dole is only $140.48 a week up to age 24, and then $168.59 a week - both way below even the minimum pay rate in the orchards.

Labour contractors such as Colquhoun, Waimarie Reihana, and Vicki Yakas at the Kawakawa Community Trust, who all send workers to Kerikeri, believe the long-term answer is to find other work in the off-season so workers can earn a year-round income.

Yakas already sends a group to Sanford's oyster factory in Kaeo, which needs seasonal labour from late May until January, neatly dovetailing with the fruit-picking season.

Others go south to the Dargaville area to harvest kumara at $11 an hour.

There is also summer work in the motels, bars and restaurants of the Bay of Islands, although this depends on transport.

Yakas tried running people around in a van but found it was not economic with everyone starting at different times in different places.

Unfortunately the poverty that comes with unemployment often prevents people driving to work.

"You'd be amazed at the number of people who have sat on a learner's licence for 20 years," Yakas says. They have never managed to save the $115 that it costs for a full driver's licence, let alone a car.

More fundamentally, unemployment seeps into people's souls.

"We had one long-term unemployment beneficiary who found it really difficult to look his partner in the face. He felt he was worthless," Yakas says.

"He came to work for the trust, and he said he could finally look his partner in the eyes and feel proud that he was out there working."

If you feel worthless, and have no money to do anything, it's hard to motivate yourself to get up in the morning, let alone go for your driver's licence or apply for a job in another town.

"A lot of them lose the confidence that they can take it [driving] any further," Yakas says.

"We ask them to go for the full licence and we pay for it and deduct it out of their wages in instalments. We also encourage them to do personal savings so that perhaps they can buy a car."

It is also hard for children to get up for school when Mum and Dad are lying in.

"When we had large numbers going off to do the kiwifruit and oranges, suddenly the school noticed that the absenteeism decreased because the father and mother were getting up and going to work," says Yakas.

Some youngsters, she says, break through the cycle when they get jobs themselves.

"I sent a couple to Sanfords that were real screw-ups at school, yet their employers up there rave about them."

Phil Marsh in Kaikohe says: "We have people who drop out of school early because they are unable to participate in the school system.

"Putting those people straight into a work environment where they are told what to do from 8 till 4 is very hard. We try to fix up that attitude."

Ngahau Davis of Moerewa's He Iwi Kotahi Tatou Trust says training young people is one of Northland's biggest businesses.

However, when they finish each course many youngsters still can't find jobs locally and just go on to another course.

"We are creating course junkies," he says.

Kotahi Tatou bravely stopped running courses and decided to create jobs for young people who didn't want to go into the orchards or the meatworks.

It got private and public sector sponsorship to build a recording studio, which has helped a couple of locals to get songs on to Auckland's Mai FM.

Brent Dudley, a CBEC supervisor who works with the Kaitaia workers in the orchards, says there are many children and grandchildren of people on the dole and they often don't see any need to work until they actually start working.

"Government doesn't help, because people know they don't have to work, they can get money for doing nothing," he says.

"It's not till you get them out here [that you can] show that you can do a shitload better working than you can on the dole.

"A lot of these guys feed on their self-pride.

"If you give them that opportunity, they lap it up."

It takes extraordinary dedication. Dudley motivates his team on the long van trip down each morning by getting them talking about how many bins they will fill that day, and tries to create "a real good atmosphere" in the orchards.

"That changes everything - get a real good team thing going with a lot of joking," he says. "It would be awesome to see the likes of Kerifresh make a conscious effort."

Kerifresh does not need such motivational effort for its 20 new Samoan workers, because even New Zealand's minimum wage is far better than they could ever earn at home.

Toiloto (Bill) Apelu, a senior constable with 14 years' experience in the Samoan police, earned only 300 tala a fortnight ($78 a week).

Creating satisfying, permanent, year-round work for unemployed Northlanders would be harder at first, but CBEC's Colquhoun believes the long-term social dividends would be huge.

"Five or 10 years from now I don't think there is going to be unemployment in Northland if we make a real effort.

"There is going to be that much work happening round the area that [the unemployed] can be absorbed," he says.

"But they won't be unless we make the effort. People will come in and take the jobs."