BERNARD Hickey of the New Zealand Herald is the latest to ask why we have the anomaly of a buoyant economy, but an entrenched - and growing - unemployment sector. Or should the more accurate term be "unemployable" - the one that put Bill English into hot water.
Bernard and Bill shouldn't be all that puzzled - It's really a no-brainer: we ourselves are the ones creating it. These are not "knowledge economy" jobs we are talking about here. Currently, there's a big shortage of builders' labourers in Auckland. And heavy traffic and machine drivers. Not to mention our ongoing failure to source dairy and orchard workers locally. Are we really recruiting thousands - in the latter case, tens of thousands - from overseas when we there's a vast pool of prospective labour already here? Unbelievable, but true - yes we are!
Particularly with regard to younger would-be employees, employers' complaints centre on lack of reliability, application and general work ethic. The refrain is usually that the local variety is more - much more - trouble than they're worth in trying to get them up to speed. Example. Not too long ago I was involved with a commendable attempt by MSD/Work and Income to get a few local youth into orchard work in the Far North. Winz had even organised to have people on hand for preparatory support, in addition to the orientation and training offered by the company. One of the Winz people later said that, of the 200-plus mainly foreign crew, he'd spent virtually the whole preparatory week concentrating on the handful of local youth. In the end, he had to concede defeat and send them home - their lack of basic functional skills or any sense of job commitment was just a bridge too far.
The common factor was that they were second or third-generation welfare dependents, and had just lost touch with what most people would call "everyday realities". For them, it was all just too hard compared to X-Boxing on the couch. The essence is that MSD has created a financial structure with which the private economy can no longer compete in the crucial low-skill worker sector. This is why a horticultural region like the Hawke's Bay has a permanent pool of about 3000 unemployed but has to import roughly that number every year to help harvest their crops. Locals see no point in going to all the trouble of working, and coping with the bureaucracy of going off and getting back on to a benefit, for a short-term job that pays little more than they receive anyway.
But here's the real trouble. It's not unemployment per se - it's the dysfunction that creeps in when people are removed from the normal engagement and dynamics of organic community life for long periods of time. Particularly with regard to disengaged working-age males. This is the toxic brew packing out the social dysfunction agencies and ramping up the negative statistics to the extent that bottom-of-the-cliff damage control now consumes nearly a third of the Government budget.
