An outrageous submission (and in the current Rena situation, unfortunate) from SeaFIC on the first day of the hearings of the Ministerial Inquiry into the treatment of crew on Foreign Chartered Vessels in the Fishing Industry.
New Zealand’s fishing industry needs more cheap Asian labour not less, the Seafood Industry Council (SeaFIC) told a ministerial inquiry into the use of foreign charter vessels (FCVs).
SeaFIC says New Zealand-flagged fishing boats cannot get local crews and they now want to import low wage labour as well. Despite high unemployment it was hard to get New Zealanders to work on fishing boats.
SeaFIC says FCVs hiring Asian crews was no different to companies going to low wage countries.
“Many New Zealand businesses have exported jobs previously done in New Zealand to other countries with wage rates considerably less than minimum wage rates in New Zealand.”
New Zealand was seen in other countries as a source of cheap skilled labour and pointed to Qantas hiring New Zealand crews at rates lower than Australians would get. The New Zealand film industry was based on cheap labour, SeaFIC said. (hah, funny that!)
SeaFIC say there is no evidence that FCV companies are failing to pay their crews according a code of practice which requires crews to receive the New Zealand minimum wage.
New Zealand’s reputation is not a function of compliance by the companies, but the result of public opinion.
“The intensity of comment in the media, whether based on fact or allegation, may present risk to international reputation.”
Yeah right.
That’s a bleepin outrage Darien!
!!!!!
Oh come on Darien. We must raise these poor asian slaves from their levelof poverty, even if it is just by 2 meals a day instead of one. And we cannot see the wealth of the wealthy and the bonuses of the executives slip to such low levels that we can no longer compete in the world market for such talent. Why that might mean employing locals.
Why is it that they only outsource the low paid jobs, why don’t these companies ever head to the cheap labour pools of Asia for their CEOs? Surely there is someone, somwhere in India or Thailand who would do the CEO’s job for 25% of the going rate.
Link doesn’t work,
@ H Stewart : thanks, fixed now.
Turning LRO on his/her head, isn’t the real question here why it was hard to get New Zealanders to work on fishing boats?
Perhaps welfare and the entitlement mentality in New Zealand is the issue?
” SeaFIC says FCVs hiring Asian crews was no different to companies going to low wage countries.
“Many New Zealand businesses have exported jobs previously done in New Zealand to other countries with wage rates considerably less than minimum wage rates in New Zealand.”
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/5799232/We-need-more-cheap-foreign-fishermen
Except that the product is not labeled as NZ made in those companies case. How the hell a FCV that fishes our EEC then heads back to China, Korea,….. to process it can market it as a New Zealand product is beyond me. What NZ input has there been ?
This is a bloody disgrace and that we allow slavery in and on our seas is an, adjectives fail me or rather your moderation rules fail me.
Interesting to hear a counter position from the representative from Talley’s Fisheries on RNZ Morning Report.
He stated that their outfit is processing around 100 requests for work a week from qualified NZers keen to get on the boats.
Given that Talleys are a significant local player in the industry, I hope that the Greens and NZLP jumps on this and calls SeaFIC on their bullsh*t.
Tribeless says:
” ….
Perhaps welfare and the entitlement mentality in New Zealand is the issue?”
Yes – too many employers expect the pittance they pay their employees to be brought up to a living wage by Working for Families and Accommodation Supplement.
Why do so many NZ employers have this sense of entitlement? How do we eliminate it?
We eliminate welfare as a lifestyle, George, because quite apart from it is the excuse under which I have lost my freedom from the brute State, my privacy from the Stasi as I live behind the IRon Drape, welfare doesn’t work. If you accept there is poverty in NZ, and I don’t – there certainly is in the countries these fishermen come from though – then that poverty is now created by the welfare state:
http://pc.blogspot.com/2011/10/unbreaking-news-poverty.html
Quote: Seventy years of just giving people more money has not made things better, it’s made them worse. In the last ten years alone around $180 billion has been taken from taxpayers and spent in a war on poverty, that’s one-hundred and eighty billion dollars on a war that no one is winning; not the government, not the taxpayer, not the 200-330,000 or so who’ve been the targets of this war over the last ten years.
That’s $180,000,000,000 in ten years — enough to have given every beneficiary in the country a massive half-million dollars each each to start their own war on poverty, and it still hasn’t worked. And it won’t. It never will. To paraphrase PJ O’Rourke,
“… the spending of this truly vast amount of money — an amount more than half again the nation’s entire gross national product in 2001 — has left everybody just sitting around slack-jawed and dumbstruck, staring into the maw of that most extraordinary paradox: You can’t get rid of poverty by giving people money.”
When do we realise that government welfare doesn’t work, least of all for those who it is supposed to help.
Surely the responsibility and conditions of the fishermen is on the Quota Owners.
[...] There has been a Ministerial inquiry into this issue going on since August last year. It doesn’t seem to have made any progress. I’m sure Labour’s Darian Fenton will continue to champion the cause. [...]
Awesome. Just awesome.
“eliminate welfare as a lifestyle”. Please post your source to indicate the basis of your claim about lifestyle welfare. Thanks in advance
I could only find this in my brief search
” Most of the people on welfare are unmarried mothers – many of them teenagers – who have extra children so that they can get more money
This is a hoary old myth that combines the resentment of beneficiaries in general, with prurient resentment of the sexy young having too much sex. In fact, the US and New Zealand evidence is that young people are having less sex, later than their parents’ generation.
In fact, only 3.1 % of those on the DPB are under 20 years of age – and that figure has barely flickered since 2005, when the figure was 2.9 %. Put another way, 97% of the people on the DPB are NOT the ‘very young women’ of Key’s lurid imagination. There are in fact, significantly more people on the DPB over 55 years of age (5.6%) than there are ‘very young women’ receiving this benefit.
The vast bulk of DPB recipients (nearly 75%) are what you would expect : they are aged between 25 and 54. Some 61% of them are caring for children six years or under – a figure that, again, has barely changed since 2005. Nearly half are caring for two or more dependent children.”
” Lots of people are on welfare for years and years, and then their children and grandchildren become welfare dependent.
This myth is based on stereotypes about the chronically shiftless and teemingly fertile poor. Lets stick with the DPB for a moment. Since the DPB involves the care of children who are dependent at least until they are 18, you’d think it would reflect lifetime dependency very strongly. Yet instead, over two thirds of DPB recipients (67.7%) are on the DPB for less than four years. More than a quarter of them (26%) are on it for less than a year, even during the recession. If this is a lifestyle choice, it is hardly a fashionable one.
Looking across all forms of benefits, 61.4 % of recipients are benefit dependent for four years or less. Only 14.3 % are on benefits for more than ten years – and since those figures include people with chronic physical and mental disabilities, the ratio of those staying on benefits because it is a “lifetime, lifestyle choice’ is lower again.”
http://werewolf.co.nz/2011/02/ten-myths-about-welfare/
I note Walmart’s concern about stocking our fish from “slavery” workforce. Does that mean you cannot buy a single Apple product from their store now?
Er, nope!
http://www.walmart.com/search/search-ng.do?search_query=apple&ic=16_0&Find=Find&search_constraint=3944