Whenever we talk about constructing and maintaining infrastructure, we must remember the people who carry out this important work. Alan Pollard, CEO, CCNZ.
The association has recently submitted on two Government proposals that could make or break our ability to scale up – the review of vocational education and training, and the review of immigration settings, including the Accredited Employer Work Visa.
The civil construction industry is continuing to experience a significant slowdown in committed and funded projects coming to market, and the reality is there hasn’t been enough work to go around. Businesses are continuing to restructure in an effort to be best placed to get through this period and ensure a foundation remains, in anticipation of an upswing in project activity. And that means that people will be losing their jobs.
The fact is, the medium to long-term outlook looks very positive, but the current situation is challenging. As central and local government organisations try to come to grips with infrastructure investment plans, the immediate impact of this pause in investment has been largely overlooked by a Government that seems, for once, long-sighted.
Announcements such as the Government Policy Statement on land transport; the vision and direction for Local Water Done Well; and the 149 projects identified for fast-track consenting announced recently are all very well (and welcomed by the industry). But announcements can take years to actually reach construction, and none offer the immediate stimulus the industry needs to retain its workforce.
The risk (and likelihood) is that, at the point in time the project tap gets turned on (and when it does it will happen quickly and at scale), there won’t be enough industry capability and capacity to deliver the projects.
My own view is that we are not likely to see any material uptick in work for the next 12 to 24 months. During this time businesses will continue to make decisions focused on short-term survival. Some will prioritise their people so they can retain as much capability and capacity as possible when work comes to market. Others won’t have that luxury.
So, it may seem unusual we are expressing serious concerns about how our future workforce will enter the industry and be trained, while in the same breath declaring there isn’t any work to do.
The thing is, only a relatively small proportion of staff restructured out of their jobs will be available in 12 to 24 months’ time – some will have moved offshore, some will have joined other industries.
And that’s not taking into account the stigma of having lost employment. Many will be suspicious of rejoining the industry given their experiences, through no fault of their previous employers. So, we need to build the channels for bringing people into the workforce now.
Education and immigration
The industry has a preference for hiring from the local candidate pool because the immigration pathway is expensive, slow, cumbersome, and temporary (unless there is a pathway to residency).
However, the vocational education proposal is to disestablish Workforce Development Councils (in our case Waihanga Ara Rau) at a time when our partnership with them is delivering positive outcomes for employers and trainees.
The Government’s proposal centres around re-establishing polytechs, which historically have not been a successful vehicle for delivering infrastructure training (we rely largely on work-based training). And for funding that is currently being directed to work-based training to be redirected to classroom-based training
I’d argue this would have a terrible outcome, and that it makes no sense to interfere with a model that is largely working. The polytechnic model lacks the ability to deliver suitably qualified candidates at scale.
Similarly, the immigration settings were changed in April this year to remove seven key civil roles from the Construction and Infrastructure Sector Agreement, thereby making it harder to bring those roles into New Zealand, At the same time, the maximum continuous stay requirement was reduced from five years to three years.
The primary reason for the removal of the roles from the Sector Agreement appears to be based on the assumption they are unskilled roles. While we support the Government’s actions to reduce the number of unskilled migrants from entering our country, we fundamentally disagree with this assumption. Most of these migrants either hold a qualification recognised in their home countries, or have considerable work experience, or a combination of both. However, the New Zealand Qualifications Authority currently does not recognise the international qualifications.
It is a serious mistake for Immigration New Zealand to compare unskilled MSD clients to civil tradespeople who often operate large and complex machinery on worksites where the risk profile requires the highest levels of health and safety awareness and practice. There is no comparison between these skilled migrant workers and a new entrant who needs to learn how to work and to operate heavy machinery worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, with no quality or safety risk.
Members therefore face having to send their highly skilled and experienced workers home and try and replace them with similarly skilled and experienced workers to do exactly the same jobs. This makes no sense.
Immigration supports, rather than detracts from, training and education outcomes. Skilled migrants provide the capacity and capability needed to enable existing staff to be deployed to train domestic workers.
It can take up to five years to train a civil construction worker and I am deeply concerned about where our future workforce will come from when we need to quickly scale up. It is ludicrous for our ability to deliver the Government’s infrastructure programme to be derailed by education and immigration policies imposed by that same Government.
We need genuine engagement from government (central and local) to agree on a way forward and support, rather than hinder, our ability to build a skilled and available workforce – we have said as much in our submissions in response to vocational education and immigration
policies.
And, by writing to ministers, we have been calling for work to come to market so that civil construction businesses can train and retain their workers.
Now we await decisions from Government.
Parting words from Jeremy Sole- a final column