Itinerant fruit picking is an arduous and poorly paid source of pocket money for students, backpackers and foreign holidaymakers each February and provides an unpredictable labour source for harvests from Hawkes Bay to Central Otago. Thus fruitgrowers as well as the Council of Trade Unions have supported anattempt to regulate the industry's labour supply from this year.
Seasonal work permits were to be replaced with a system in which growers registered as "recognised seasonal employers" would hire the same pickers every year, providing more certainty for both.
The catch, it turns out, is that a picker from overseas - vital to the industry in times of full employment - could work for only one registered employer for the season, which might last three weeks in any region. No longer might they come into the country and follow the harvest from region to region as they used to.
Consequently, too few of them are coming. For weeks growers have been warning of a labour shortage that could leave export fruit rotting on their trees.
Now, with the season about to start, Hawkes Bay and Nelson in urgent need of another 5000 pickers, and a $2.3 billion export crop at risk, the Government has had to ditch the restriction on overseas pickers, at least for the time being.
Growers should count this a salutary experience. If their labour supply was unreliable previously, regulation has only made it worse.
The aborted regime for foreign workers was merely transitional in any case. Now the CTU is concerned that "growers are only looking for immigration solutions". If its ultimate aim is make fruit picking another protected job for a domestic workforce, growers should be wary. They might wish they still had access to the wider pool of pickers that has had to be urgently restored to them today.
