FOR RSE, IT’S BACK TO ‘BUSINESS AS USUAL’

In Samoa, the demand for seasonal work was so great a worker registration day ended with nine people in hospital. Dileepa Fonseka reports.

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 had 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.

A witness 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 was 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According to an analysis of unpublished data on the Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme by Australian National University academic Charlotte Bedford there were more than 12,200 RSE workers in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 fewer 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. conditions. Legal proceedings around the case are still continuing.

‘‘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. 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