When unemployment is at its highest rate in 13 years, it’s difficult to understand why some employers are struggling to find people willing to take on manual work.
Several employers desperately seeking reliable workers say it is as if people are unprepared for the workforce and don’t want to prove themselves.
Orchardists and dairy farmers have been noticing this for some time. Local people aren’t interested in the jobs they offer which is why there are so many workers from overseas employed in these industries. Orchard and dairy farm work might not be everybody’s first choice. But any job should be better than no job and people in employment are much more likely to get a job they want than someone who is unemployed.
Homepaddock 
Welfare is just too easy.
The furore over resthome rates of pay only arises in part because a significant number of mature and older women still value a job over welfare.
Sadly though in the far north and fruit growing areas, locals enjoy a lifestyle on welfare by choice while operators are forced to import labour.
That said, Horticulture and Dairy need more motivated workers than the losers who have no incentive to change. The potential for sabotage, deliberate or from stupidity is vast.
It is just too easy to be a ‘benny’
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GD -agree. But another angle . It really pleases me to see workers from overseas having gainful employment and opportunities they did not have in their home countries- much better than sending aid to these countries. The rub is we are still left with “It is just too easy to be a ‘benny’”
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Ele – this is the same cultural problem I mentioned in my previous post.
I see it in my kids and their contemporaries. The are not educated to work in the cow shed – they are educated to “follow their dreams”.
With mine I inculcated in them the concept that life does not always deliver and you have to do what you have to do – which is why they ended up graduating with useful degrees and in one case no student loan at all and in the other a small loan now paid off.
The oldest is a great dancer, I’d have loved for her to be a ballerina and so would have she but she realized that most aspiring ballerinas do not get their wish and dance forever in the chorus for peanuts and so she put a lot of her energies into Nursing, as well as ballet which is where she ended up and she loves it. But she earned it and paid for it by wiping old people bums in the nursing home
But their friends were all going to be TV reporterettes or corporate lawyers and so forth.
One girl I know did get her LLB and now at 25 years old and with huge debt is a clerk working in WINZ, go figure.
Our focus is all wrong, our motivations are all wrong the motivations we give our kids are wrong
To come back to the previous post, a friend of my son’s sired a child and in these enlightened times did not make the mother of his child “an honest women” as they used to say. He is wacked with liable parent contribution – which seems fair – but if he got a job in the cowshed he’d be little better off than on the dole after the IRD takes his tax and liable parent contribution for a child he has nothing to do with – a de-motivator if there ever was one.
When it comes down to it if you leave school a nineteen after thirteen years of doing subjects like Drama, media studies and so forth the cow shed is a big come down – no?
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Totally agree, its bizarre in a way because Dairy is a real opportunity for a lot of these people to make something of their lives, if they apply themselves its well structured and there are excellent opportunities for further education and advancement through sharemilking etc… many of them could be paper millionaires in 5-10 years,
The quality of some who come through is astounding, in a job interview I once asked, “any history with drugs” and they replied “presently but I’d be willinging to give it up for the right position”
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