Whenever you discuss labour relations between New Zealand and the Pacific, three letters are never far away: RSE.
The Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme (to use its formal name) allows New Zealand’s horticulture and viticulture industries to recruit workers solely from the Pacific – unless a company can prove it has pre-existing ties with workers elsewhere – for seasonal work that Kiwis are either unable or unwilling to do.
When it was originally established in 2007, just 5000 places were available each year, but the cap has crept up year by year, with 19,000 places available in the 2022/23 year.
Under the new Government, that creep could turn into a leap: during last year’s election campaign, the National Party proposed a doubling of the worker cap from 19,000 to 38,000 by 2028, while the party’s coalition agreement with Act includes a less specific commitment to “increase the cap on the number of workers”.
The scheme helps Kiwi employers to fill labour shortages while allowing Pacific workers to save more money for their families – but it has not escaped criticism either at home or abroad.
In 2022, a report from New Zealand’s Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner said gaps in the system “may enable a systemic pattern of human rights abuses” against Pacific workers, recommending a suite of changes and additional safeguards.
From the Pacific perspective, financial benefits are offset by the worsening of the countries’ own worker shortages, with the numbers heading to New Zealand or Australia (which has its own seasonal employment scheme for Pacific workers) having spiked since the Covid-19 pandemic.
At the Tongan hotel where New Zealand media stayed during Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters’ trip to the Pacific, a sign apologetically warned that only guests could order food at the restaurant due to a shortage of staff.
The exclusive Samoan resort where Peters and his entourage stayed in Apia has also been affected, its general manager telling Stuff last year the hotel had lost almost 60 workers to seasonal employment schemes in the prior 12 months.
In January last year, the Samoan government put a temporary halt on its workers taking part in both the Australian and New Zealand seasonal schemes, with the country’s prime minister Fiamē Naomi Mata’afa telling the ABC that Pacific states should not be seen as “outposts” to “grow” labourers for foreign nations.
“When we’re feeling the impact of losing our human resources through these various labour schemes, we really do have to look at how we respond,” the prime minister told the ABC.
After meeting Peters in Apia on Friday, Fiamē confirmed the issue had been a topic of discussion but drew a distinction between the approach of the two trans-Tasman nations.
“The issues arrive when the goalposts are moved: I think New Zealand has been quite good in maintaining the essence of ‘seasonal and circular’ but then we see…our neighbours in Australia, there are now other evolving options which moves away from the original agreement and that is an issue that we will continue to raise.”
The numbers back up Fiamē’s views, too. Research published last year on the first 15 years of the RSE scheme showed that 44 percent of the Pacific workers recruited to the programme took part for just one season – a sign, the authors said, that employers were “distributing seasonal work opportunities instead of becoming over-reliant on return workers”.
“In essence, the RSE scheme is operating as intended,” researchers Charlotte Bedford and Richard Bedford concluded, with the majority of workers and their families taking advantage of the scheme “for a relatively short period of time, often to achieve quite specific social and economic objectives”.
However, Pacific concerns about immigration policies go beyond seasonal workers.
Several countries have called on New Zealand to grant visa waivers for visitors from the region, with Samoa’s commerce minister criticising the glacial pace of processing times for general visitor visas compared with the faster turnaround for its valuable workers.
Fiamē has been at the forefront of Pacific leaders calling for a region-wide approach to labour mobility, revealing last year she had raised the idea of a European Union-style bloc for free movement and labour rights with then-deputy prime minister Carmel Sepuloni.
On Friday, the prime minister reiterated her view that a wider discussion was needed, potentially through the Pacer Plus economic agreement between New Zealand, Australia and eight other Pacific nations.
“There’s a broader platform to hold those discussions and to look at, not just New Zealand-Samoa or Samoa-Australia because everybody seems to be going to these two countries, but perhaps we need to look broader at our region – what it is as a region that we offer that people can move around in.”
“We’re coming with an open mind, and if we can make it work more effectively for the economic and social welfare of the Pacific people and daresay our own country, then we’ll give it a fair go to see what can happen.”
Winston Peters, on a ‘free movement’ zone within the Pacific
The last Labour government showed little sign of wanting to move on broader visa access: foreign affairs officials told Newsroom then it was focused on the RSE scheme and expanding labour mobility opportunities, while Fiamē said Sepuloni’s response to her Pacific bloc proposal was to argue that “all other people in the islands will want to come and live in New Zealand and Australia”.
Peters indicated a willingness to act where Labour hadn’t, promising “to do something” about the visa waiver issue and saying the Government was willing to explore the concept of a free-movement Pacific.
“We’re coming with an open mind, and if we can make it work more effectively for the economic and social welfare of the Pacific people and daresay our own country, then we’ll give it a fair go to see what can happen.”
Yet in the same breath, he disparaged the “massive immigration numbers” under the Labour government and the stress that had placed on the country’s infrastructure – a strain that the current administration may be reluctant to worsen by allowing more inward migration.
Samoa will face infrastructural strains of its own when it hosts the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting later this year, although Fiamē expressed confidence the country would manage while thanking New Zealand for the support it had provided to date for the event.
Hosting such events in future would presumably be made easier, however, if Samoa could hold on to more of its own workers.
