KEY POINTS:
Overseas recruitment of caregivers is left to the market, within the constraints of general immigration policy. Employers and agents have found several ways to do it.
Some agents such as the nursing bureau Nightingale's, have sent staff to Pacific nations to recruit caregivers and nurses directly, under the Pacific access quota.
Veisiale Sio, 39, and Lesieli Vea, 22, were both recruited with no previous nursing experience. Sio drove a taxi in between looking after four children aged 14 to 6, and came here in December with her husband and family. Vea was studying accounting.
They signed contracts which promised them at least 40 hours work a week at weekday rates of $12.30 an hour, weekend rates of $15.37 an hour and a $10 night allowance, making annual incomes which were estimated in their documents at $28,142.40.
They also each signed separate pieces of paper stating that they would attend a free four-week training course on arrival in New Zealand, with accommodation and meals also provided free.
In return, they were bonded to work for Nightingale's for two years, with a penalty of $2000 if they left early.
When they arrived at Nightingale's office in Auckland, they were told that the only accommodation was a house where they would have had to all live together. Both opted to stay with relatives in Mangere, where Sio and her family have now rented a house.
After completing their one month's training last month, they found that they were simply "on call" for work at any time, with no regular guaranteed work.
Sio worked only 11 hours in a week. Vea had 16 hours' work in her first week and 29 in the second.
"The main problem is getting there. He sends me as far as the North Shore," says Vea.
Adds Sio: "We don't know to get there. We have no cars or van and we don't know how to catch the bus to the North Shore or Ponsonby or Takanini."
The two women are now trying to leave without paying the $2000 penalty, arguing Nightingale's has failed to fulfil its side of the bargain.
However, Nightingale's disputes this and issued a log of shifts it says Sio refused to work during February.
"Nightingale's offers to provide full board and meals for candidates during the four-week training course," the company says. "However to date, none of the candidates involved in the course, including Veisiale Sio, have taken up this offer, electing instead to stay with friends and family."
A second recruitment method is through agents. Dennis Maga found that Filipino nurses and caregivers often owe $7000 to $8000 to a combination of agents in the Philippines, local NZ agencies owned by Filipino residents here, and their employers.
A Filipino nurse who came to Wellington last year borrowed $9000 from a local agency, AltaSolutions, to pay for the nursing competency assessment required for NZ registration, plus accommodation during the two-month assessment and a service fee for finding a job. The interest rate was 4 per cent a month, repayable out of her wages in her first year in work.
She was bonded to work in a rest home for a year at $21 an hour.
An Auckland nurse, Francisco Paredes, borrowed 165,000 pesos ($5125) from Reliable Recruitment in the Philippines at an interest rate that was so high that the amount he paid back after six months was 320,000 pesos ($9941).
Filipino journalist Jose Costas says his wife, a registered nurse in the Philippines, paid almost 500,000 pesos ($15,534) to an agent who placed her into a 12-week aged care education course at King's Education in Christchurch, which qualified her to work as a caregiver but not as a nurse. She earns $14 an hour at Ryman Healthcare.
Another nurse paid US$5000 ($6283) to an Auckland agent who put her through the correct competency assessment course which allowed her to get NZ nursing registration, but then assigned her to work under a three-year bond at a small Northland rest home which did not use her skills in acute care.
She regularly had to work more than the eight hours she was paid for, but was not paid for the overtime.
Shifts were changed at short notice and all pay was at the same rate regardless of whether it was a weekday or weekend.
"I really wanted to be in a hospital," she says.
She offered to repay to the rest home the $5600 which it had spent on her airfare and training, but the owner refused, and when she paid and left anyway, he sued her. The New Zealand Nurses' Organisation defended the case and the judge ruled that the owner was only entitled to get back what he had actually paid to recruit her.
A Christchurch rest home manager who chairs the Nursing Council, Beverley Rayna, says she has had six to eight applications for caregiver jobs from Filipino registered nurses who have been brought to New Zealand on student visas by private English language schools such as King's and Link College.
"They have paid fees to the language school which puts them through an aged care education course for caregivers. That is not at the level that nurses need," she says.
"My view is that they are paying a lot of money and they are being exploited by the recruiters or the English language schools or both."
She challenged Link College and received "an absolute barrage of abuse".
Paulo Garcia, a Filipino solicitor at Henderson's Corban Revell, says he recently met six Filipinos who were brought here by a Filipino recruiter who gave them rooms out the back of her house in Mt Wellington until she could find jobs for them. "They call it the Dog House," he says. "There's no cabinet space, you have to live off your luggage. There's no heating.
The agent placed the six people - two nurses, two dentists and two accountants - in a 10-month homoeopathy course in Kingsland for which they paid a further $10,000 on the basis that it would help their residence applications.
