Last month, I discussed the reasons why RTF was joining with Business NZ to oppose the Government’s intention to introduce Fair Pay Agreements/national awards to our industry.
The issue is that the variability of the New Zealand freight task and the flexible employment conditions that it demands just do not fit with this Government’s view of the world.
Unfortunately, it seems as though they are making the same mistake regarding the treatment of migrant workers.
As trucking operators will know, New Zealand’s immigration policy has been politically driven by the xenophobic perception that foreigners have been stealing our houses and farmland, which has conspired to deprive the transport industry of a much-needed source of workers.
Ever since truck drivers were taken off the Immediate Skills Shortage List, transport operators have struggled to keep up with New Zealand’s ever-growing freight demand.
It has become so difficult to hire overseas truck drivers to fill gaps in our workforce that most operators have simply given up.
RTF recognises that immigration will never be a long-term substitute for developing homegrown talent and nor should it be, but we do believe that it has an important role to play to fill critical skill gaps when the economy demands it.
The Government was rightly praised by RTF in late 2018 for announcing the introduction of a suite of short-term “sector agreements”.
These sector agreements are to assist certain industries to employ more migrant workers in return for those sectors developing strategies to ultimately employ more New Zealanders and reduce their reliance on foreign workers.
Road transport was one of the sectors identified to enter negotiations with Government, however, that is still a couple of years away.
In light of a number of high-profile cases, the Government has recently begun a review of temporary migrant worker exploitation and while there is no doubt that these situations do exist in New Zealand, we believe that the issue is actually much broader than the parameters of the Government’s investigation.
RTF’s submission to the MBIE-run consultation process focuses on the fact that there is a deeper issue related to general exploitation of people in roles of subservience, whether they are migrants or not.
We point out that in road transport there is a convoluted chain of command that typically ends at the customer.
The customer bargains with transport operators in order to establish a favourable delivery schedule and drive down the price.
Margins for operators are therefore, slim and can even be non-existent depending on the fluctuations in fixed costs, such as fuel and RUCs.
By endeavouring to meet the expectations of customers at low freight rates the transport operator is forced to work longer and harder and make savings where they can to make ends meet.
MBIE’s consultation document seeks to remedy a number of exploitative practices within businesses, yet it does not seek to address the external drivers of some of these practices.
Fundamentally, it is the aggressive driving down of freight rates by customers that leads to the “race to the bottom” for transport company owners.
This of course is not something unique to the road transport industry.
Many other sectors suffer from the same phenomenon and we have seen the result of this “race to the bottom” play out fairly disastrously in the building and construction sector in recent times.
What needs much more investigation is what the real chain of responsibility is and where does that start and stop.
We are concerned that the Government is heading blindly into an area that it doesn’t really understand in order to satisfy the public perception that it is doing something.
The risk is that imposing more rigid rules on employers will only make it more difficult for businesses to source the temporary workforce they need when things get busy.
We believe the best approach is to first ensure that all workers, migrant or otherwise, are educated about their rights under the law and what are considered exploitative working conditions.
If we expect workers to report instances of exploitation, they must also know about the tools that are available to enable them to do so.
This can be particularly challenging with migrant communities, but many New Zealand workers also do not know what they are entitled to, especially those that are new to the workforce.
Finally, resources must be available to carry out effective investigations across the whole supply chain and not just narrowly focus on the employee-employer relationship, as that will not necessarily get to the root of the problem.
The worst thing the Government could do is unfairly target employers for a problem that in many cases is not of their own making and may well only exacerbate existing labour shortages.
