Dileepa Fonseka: Back to 'business as usual' for the Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme
Thursday, 15 September 2022
ANALYSIS: Outside the EFKS hall in Apia people started lining up at 4am, a few hours later nine people were in hospital and Samoa Police were dispersing a crowd of thousands.
It was June of last year and Australia had just opened up its seasonal worker employment scheme.
To get a place workers had to register at the EFKS hall, the Samoa Global News reported a crowd of thousands formed and even though 600 people were being let in at a time it just wasn’t enough.
The crowd outside started to get agitated, so authorities decided to let more of them in, but people started filling up every corner of the hall which pushed everyone together so tightly that some people couldn’t breathe.
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An eyewitness told the Samoa Global News the people up against the windows broke them in an attempt not to suffocate.
But the broken windows only created a way for more people to pile into the hall and a small contingent of three police officers were quickly overwhelmed.
They called in reinforcements for crowd control and brought in ambulances for people who had been hit by shards of glass or were suffocating. One of the pictures of the aftermath shows a pile of jandals and glass next to a dislodged window frame.
Before the pandemic, half of Samoa’s economy was made up of two things: tourism and money from Samoans working overseas.
When the borders closed Pacific Island countries like Samoa faced more than a year without tourism and also one where seasonal workers were not able to regularly travel to countries like Australia and New Zealand.
So when both Australia and New Zealand started re-opening their seasonal worker schemes last year there was no shortage of people desperate for a place.
According to an analysis of unpublished data on the Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme by Australian National University academic Charlotte Bedford there were more than 12,200 RSE workers in the country by June of this year, up from less than 7000 the year before and more than there were at the same time in 2019.
A one-way quarantine-free travel bubble between New Zealand and the Pacific Islands brought 8200 workers in and 4000 workers were here before the bubble opened up.
Bedford notes that some of these workers have been in New Zealand since the borders closed and that this is their third consecutive winter here.
‘They can’t feed themselves’
Jason Sheardown was born in the Solomon Islands, but has spent almost all his life in New Zealand.
More than two years ago he advocated for a group of Solomon Island workers who were stuck in New Zealand during winter and wanted to return home.
They tape-recorded their boss allegedly threatening to withhold their flights because they complained about their conditions. Legal proceedings around the case are still continuing today.
“This [Recognised Seasonal Employer] scheme will never go away, because they need it, the countries need it,” Sheardown says.
“They can’t feed themselves, so they will come here.”
While there are plenty of RSE workers in the country now, two years ago New Zealand was facing a different problem: seasonal workers who couldn’t leave.
When the border closed in March 2020 nearly 11,000 seasonal workers were stranded in New Zealand on seasonal contracts.
The strict level 4 lockdown meant they couldn’t work, were confined to their living quarters and often needed to draw on online ordering services they had never used before if they wanted to access basic goods and services.
By June 2020 more than 9700 workers were still here and the weather was starting to get colder. Some workers were desperate to get back, not just because they had been away from home for so long but because Cyclone Harold had ripped through their homes in the Pacific.
The New Zealand Defence Force started flying Vanuatu citizens back on repatriation flights but thousands more seasonal workers were unable to leave, experiencing a full New Zealand winter in accommodation built to house workers for the summer months.
A winter with too many workers
There also wasn’t enough seasonal work for them since workers for Recognised Seasonal Employers are only allowed to work for other RSE businesses and by winter Kiwifruit and apple season was over.
Between July and September less than 7000 seasonal workers were needed to prune kiwifruit and grapes. A discussion paper from Bedford and Rochelle Bailey, on managing RSE worker wellbeing during Covid-19, says this left a surplus of 3000 seasonal workers from July 2020 onwards.
The situation put pressure on RSE workers and employers because it created a set of circumstances vastly different to how the scheme is usually run. Employers struggled to find work for their workers so some had to support them with their own money and resources.
Legally, RSE firms have a pastoral care responsibility over their employees and are responsible for what happens to them, but they can claim the costs of discharging some of these obligations – like providing accommodation, food or transportation – from their workers’ salaries over time.
An ANU study of RSE across a 10-year period highlights that debt was part of the scheme from its foundation because of how poor the workers were.
Out of 232 workers recruited by one company only 50 could afford a $200 visa and fewer than 25 had the ability to cover their food costs for their first week in New Zealand.
A recruiting company took out a bank loan of more than $1 million to cover these upfront costs, but it required workers to repay it.
“The recruiting company needed the men to be ‘good’ workers and to work long hours, so that they could repay their debts and the company could pay off their own debt incurred in bringing the men to New Zealand,” the study says.
The first workers also did not understand a lot of what was written in their employment contracts, the report says a common refrain from workers was: “If we did not sign we knew we couldn’t go. So we just signed and came.”
However, the report notes this was in 2007 and by 2017 knowledge had improved.
Pressure goes on the RSE scheme
A Stuff investigation revealed some migrant horticulture workers were being housed six men to a room, and charged $150 a week to sleep in damp conditions that were making them sick.
Some were allegedly unable to travel home because they were in too much debt to their employers.
Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner Saunoamaali'i Karanina Sumeo raised concerns about substandard housing where people had little freedom or privacy.
Improving the wellbeing of RSE workers was also a focus of this year’s annual RSE conference in July, and the public furore around the issue was front of mind for the horticulture industry in August, with Horticulture New Zealand putting out a statement after some RSE employers criticised the practices of others.
“To break up, become disjointed or start to finger point would do nothing to maintain our social licence,” the statement said.
“The significant majority of you do a good to excellent job within the RSE scheme.
“If you are concerned about how others may be performing, let your product groups know and we will assist. The RSE programme is yours collectively to protect.”
A review of the RSE scheme was supposed to start in 2019 but was delayed by Covid-19, it will now take place in 2023.
However, Sheardown doubts such a review will make a difference, in part because of how the RSE scheme looks from the outside.
When people look at many of these situations they will see an employer providing food, accommodation and taking care to protect workers from the influence of criminal gangs by preventing visitors from entering dormitories.
All make sense from a pastoral care point of view, but Sheardown argues the problem is this has a big impact on individual freedom.
A group of workers came to Sheardown recently complaining of having $105 per week deducted from their pay for a nutritious lunch where, if they had the choice, they would have eaten a less nutritious meal and saved their money.
“Protecting them from meth, giving them a nutritious diet, stopping them from getting into bad habits with alcohol … we look at it and we say ‘oh yeah there are positives to it, greater good maybe’.”
But this approach means when Sheardown’s family comes to New Zealand from the Solomon Islands he often can’t see them because their accommodation bars visitors – not out of spite, but out of care.
“We do that with animals, we put them in pens, we give them nutritious food, and they can’t complain because at the end of the day they’re not human.
“You just forget that they’re a human being with rights, they're not cattle.”