A lack of seasonal staff is adding to the pressures Central Otago fruit growers face from the weather and also hampering industry growth.
Workers to harvest the area's main crops of cherries, apricots, apples and grapes were scarce this past season and that could be worse for the coming season, growers say.
If had not been able to access 50 Vanuatuans from Blenheim at the last minute through Seasonal Solutions, he would have been in dire straits, Central Otago Winegrowers Association president James Dicey said.
Presumably the workers are accommodated on site so travelling from anywhere in NZ would be possible.
There are currently 129,000 people on the new Job Seeker Support Benefit. But even in Alexandra, Balclutha, Dunedin, Gore, Invercargill, Mosgiel, Oamaru, Queenstown, and Timaru there were over 4,000 people claiming an unemployment benefit in June (the number has probably been boosted to around 5-6,000 on JSS).
Any work is good work despite the Left's propensity for describing manual, casual jobs as "dead-end" . As well,
''To progress and go forward, we need an adequate casual staff base. We can't grow our permanent staff base without growing our business and to grow the business, we need more casual staff.
''The more we can harvest, the more we can grow and the more permanent jobs we can create.''
Anyway, good on the Ni-Vanuatu who haven't lost the will to be self-supporting.
5 comments:
Vanuatu is my favorite place in the world and the people are interesting. Their work ethic is mixed at home - it seems once they earn enough to pay the school fees and buy fuel for cooking they are disinclined to show up. Still, I'd move there tomorrow if I wasn't shackled here in the real world.
3:16
I grew up in Dunedin and a fair number of my high school friends went up to Central Otago to pick fruit during the summer holidays. I had a job in town and, to be honest, I wished I'd gone up Central with them. They usually slept in tents in the orchards and uniformly had a ball. Heck, I'd do it now if it were the right season.
By the way: if you ever found shredded gumboots in your canned apricots, I can tell you who to blame :)
Yep - this is what I've been saying for *years*.
We keep on bringing in overseas workers because our own bludgers are too lazy (and WINZ is too lazy to *make* them work).
WINZ are *badly* screwing up if they are not sending those on the dole to pick fruit.
It's not laziness - it's commonsense.
Who would go to pick fruit, actually have to work, in fields, in the sun and the rain, only with portable toilets, when John Key's nomination National government will feed, house, clothe, educate, and treat entire bludgers and their families - complete with indoor plumbing?
The incentive simple isn't there - and Basher's reforms will make basically zero difference.
Too hard to move, have to arrange childcare, have to arrange access visits, have to see the probation officer or the jobcentre or any of a thousand excuses.
Simply abolish the benefit - and suddenly, NZ would have a surfeit of manual workers - hell lots of 'em would immediately move to Oz to eat, and lots more back to Vanuatu or Indonesia or wherever.
welfare dependency is caused by welfare.
want to end dependency? end welfare.
I believe it was early on in the Clark regime when they changed the rules that meant people on benefits were disadvantaged by taking seasonal work. Lindsay may have more details?
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