Big step forward to a job

Indra Chhana looks across to Mangere Centre Park from the superette he has run for the past 14 years and marvels at the way his neighbourhood has been transformed.

"Five years ago there were a lot of young people hanging around the park, walking round the streets, looking for trouble," he says. "At that time you could see a lot of youngsters hanging round the spacies and all those kinds of things, they used to come and get 20c coins. You could tell the real troublemakers.

"Since then, they have got a job, and it's completely changed - especially three or four youngsters. A couple of them are working in factories. One of them is working on driveways and concreting.

"When they come into the shop they are not hanging round, they just grab what they want and they're on their way."

Evidently the statistics did not lie. New Zealand has the lowest unemployment rate in the world, and it really is changing the lives of people who were shut out of the paid workforce through years of economic restructuring.

Out of 56 working-age adults in 21 homes in McKinstry Ave, the middling Mangere street where Chhana and his family live behind their shop, 46 are now in paid work. Four others are studying and four are at home with children while their partners work. Just two people are on benefits - one young man who says his last boss had "good reason" to sack him, and a woman with special needs who does voluntary work.

It's still tougher across town in Hills Rd, Otara, dominated by ageing two-storey Housing New Zealand blocks.

There, 20 out of 74 working-age adults are still on benefits, 49 are working (including three beneficiaries working part-time), five are studying and three are partners at home with children. But even there, most of the beneficiaries are sick, have disabilities or are looking after people with disabilities or young children. Only six are free to work but not working - three by choice, and three because they want to work but can't get jobs.

Meripa Stowers, a Samoan mother of four children aged from 13 to 2, recently got a $12-an-hour job as an office clerk after applying for more than 10 jobs in the past few months. Her husband earns $13 an hour as a boat finisher.

"It's hard, especially if you come from the Islands, because they say you have to have experience in New Zealand," she says.

"Living-wise, it's cheaper in the Islands. But for the kids, the future is better here."

George Mulatalo, aged 27 and also from Samoa, says it was "very difficult" to find his job as a machine operator a year ago, but he now earns "good money" to support his wife and two boys aged nine months and 4. He hopes to study accounting at the Manukau Institute of Technology after July, when his wife completes a nursing course.

"We can afford stuff, but not very much. We can survive," he says. "If we still need me to work [after July], I will."

The statistics show that these stories are typical. The number of New Zealanders unemployed and seeking work has almost halved in the past six years, from 140,400 in December 1998 to just 75,000 last December. In the same period, the numbers in paid work for at least one hour a week rose by 338,600, from 60.5 per cent to 65.9 per cent of the total population aged 15 and over.

Yet despite this strong growth, many still can't get work. The number of beneficiaries (excluding superannuitants) rose from 30,962 in 1970 to a peak of 380,835 in 1999. By last year it was still 320,121.

Shrinking unemployment rolls have been partly offset by swelling numbers on both sickness and invalid benefits, up from a combined postwar low of 12,441 in 1960 to 116,470 last year, and still rising.

In part, that is simply the effect of our ageing workforce. Social Development Minister Steve Maharey says this explains 52 per cent of the recent rise in sickness benefits. In part, it may be due to staff of Maharey's Work and Income agency encouraging people to go on sickness and invalid benefits, which exempt people from looking for work, even when they actually can work.

But it is also clear from the figures that the numbers of people written off as "sick" or "invalids" are linked directly to the number of unemployed, with a lag of five to 10 years while they initially try to get jobs.

Dismantling of import protection and the globalisation of production and corporate ownership have increased competitive pressures on all companies, making it harder than ever to carry workers who can't "pull their weight".

Hills Rd resident Upoko Teao, 50, a mechanic and marine engineer from the Cook Islands, has been on a sickness benefit since he came here for kidney treatment in 1993.

"I'm still raring to go back to work in the trades areas that my health can cope with," he says. "But when I see ads in the paper and apply, I'm always knocked back. The usual comment is that there were so many applicants."

But it is not just the sick, the disabled and their carers who are missing out. So are many young people, Maori, to a lesser extent new immigrants from the Pacific and Asia, and older workers who became casualties of economic restructuring.

At the peak of postwar unemployment in March 1992, 8.4 per cent of Pakeha New Zealanders were counted as unemployed. In the latest tally released this month, when the overall unemployment rate was down to just 3.6 per cent, the rate among Maori was still 8.9 per cent - a vast improvement on the peak Maori unemployment rate of 27.4 per cent in 1992, but still worse than the Pakeha rate ever got to.

The current rate for both Pacific people and others (mainly Asians) is 6.5 per cent. For teenagers aged 15 to 19, it is 11.6 per cent. Thomas Ngaroi, 19, who came here from the Cook Islands when he was a year old, says his fellow Pacific Island students at Henderson's Liston College were bright, but did not think they were.

"They know they can do the work, but in their minds someone is telling them, 'No you can't do it'," he says.

"At Liston we had the PIs and the Asian students, and the Asian students were getting more attention than us because they had more ability to learn. For the Pacific Islanders that was hard for us because we couldn't bond with the teachers and there were a few discriminations."

That changed only when he left school and joined first a rugby course at North Harbour and then, last year, a coaching course run by Sports Education NZ (SENZ). He was sent to teach young children at Glen Eden Primary. "Seeing the little kids smile at you, letting them feel good, touches your heart," he says.

He was inspired to become a teacher. This year he is doing another SENZ course which prepares students to go on to university teacher's college.

Fellow student Unga Toki, 18, who attended Mt Roskill Grammar, says: "In school we have a lot of European teachers. They tend to teach you but not get down and see things from how you see it."

At SENZ, all students and tutors up to and including chief executive Grant Hobbs wear sports-style uniforms.

"Even though the high leaders are white, they don't look it.

"They make me feel welcome. At school you'd never see a principal come into a class and make jokes with us, you never see him come on to our level," Toki says.

Henrietta Ikenasio, 21, says she was "really naughty" as a schoolgirl at Otahuhu's McAuley High, and her teachers were "shocked" when she told them she was joining SENZ's teaching course. But SENZ tutors such as Lynn Su'a were "really inspirational".

Ikenasio, Toki and Ngaroi all want to go back to their home islands to teach after they qualify.

At Tapa Employment Services in Onehunga, an older group of job-seekers discouraged by years of rejections are being encouraged to start ringing up for jobs again. Cook Island-born Lyn (not her real name), 43, spent 10 years as a machinist until her clothing factory closed, and has applied unsuccessfully ever since for jobs such as warehousing and cleaning.

She actually got a job this month, but her daughter got food poisoning on the day Lyn was due to start work, and the employer gave the job to someone else.

Michael, 53, was a design analyst at Fisher and Paykel for nine years but was made redundant nine years ago and has had only temporary jobs since.

"I did start a course on programming at AIT a few years ago, but I had to flag it away," he says. "I couldn't survive. Going from the dole to a student allowance is about a $40 decrease, and you have to pay for the cost of things like the course."

(The student allowance for a single person aged 25 or over is the same as the dole, $164.16 a week. But on the dole you can get an accommodation supplement of up to $100 a week in Auckland, whereas the student accommodation benefit is capped at $40.)

A whole new species of companies such as Tapa and SENZ, and tertiary institutes such as Te Wananga o Aotearoa, are picking up people who have been demotivated by teachers or by years of rejections from potential employers.

Maharey hopes that people on sickness, invalid and domestic purposes benefits will also get such help under his plan, announced this week, to abolish the separate benefit categories from 2007 and tailor assistance to each individual's needs.

National welfare spokeswoman Judith Collins says labour laws also need to be changed to let employers take on new workers on 90-day trial, to reduce the risks involved in employing people who have been overseas, unemployed or in jail.

At the 2002 election, the Labour Party promised to "have all 15 to 19 year olds in appropriate education, training, work or other options which will lead to long-term economic independence and well-being" by 2007. Almost three years on, despite the world's lowest unemployment rate, that target still looks like a stiff challenge. Extending it to everyone who wants to work would be even stiffer.