BAD JOBS
Every night between 8.30 and 10, seven days a week, Ian Smart would get an email from his employer telling him whether he had work the next day. The 64-year-old was employed to collect kiwifruit samples from Bay of Plenty orchards and deliver them for testing to determine if the crop was ready for harvest the next day — an essential task in the export supply chain. If the email from his employer, Hill Laboratories, said there was work, he’d be up at 5.30am for a day of unknown duration — it might be six hours, or nine hours, or 11. If the email said there was no work for him it was too late to arrange anything else. Some weeks he got one day, sometimes two, occasionally seven. And when there was no work, there was also no pay.
You could tell that Penina* was a temporary worker at The Warehouse distribution centre in Auckland only by her orange vest. People in orange vests did exactly the same work as the permanent employees, who wore green vests. But Penina, 24, was employed by a labour hire firm called Kelly Services, which paid her the-then minimum wage of $18.90 an hour and on-sold her to The Warehouse. The permanents, who were on a union contract, got $24 an hour. Penina hoped for the better pay and security of a permanent job too. Instead, after nine months of unbroken service, working from two in the afternoon until 10.30 at night, she was put off without notice, explanation or compensation.
Asneil Kumar was technically a “self-employed contractor” but he only had one client, New Zealand Post. He had to buy and wear its uniform and pay to have its logo painted on his own van. He also had to pay for the GPS-enabled scanner that monitored his movements during eleven-and-a-half-hour days delivering parcels around the Auckland suburb of Beachlands. Including frequent Saturday work, it was a 60-hour week. With upwards of 350 packages a day to deliver, there was no time for breaks. He got $389 a day, from which he paid all his costs — replacement drivers if he or his kids got sick, fuel, insurance, repairs, maintenance, depreciation, ACC. He never took a holiday.
* “It’s a precarious enough position as it is, without being named in an article,” said one worker when I asked if they were willing to be identified. This was a common response, and so where requested we have given some workers false names (marked with an asterisk), and in other cases used only their first names.
Angus* has a Master of Arts and a $75,000 student loan, and worked as a University of Canterbury tutor. Each semester, he taught six tutorial groups of around 20 undergraduate students. For a year, his life was a jigsaw of five-month fixed-term part-time contracts on $23 an hour. A quarter of tutors, lab demonstrators and teaching assistants at the university have been stuck on short-term contracts like these for three years or more. Because tutorials were spread out across the week, it was impossible for Angus to take other parttime work to top up his income. If he got sick, he usually worked anyway because he wasn’t entitled to sick leave. To do the job properly — marking essays with proper care, giving feedback, supporting stressed students — he routinely worked for nothing.
At the Takapuna branch of the Inland Revenue Department, Rebecca Langford was a Madisonian. That was the name around the office for a contingent of workers from labour hire company Madison Recruitment. They performed core functions such as customer service and claims processing, but were paid significantly less than permanent employees doing the same tasks. Langford, who processed Working for Families tax credits, estimates she would have made $13,000 more per year as a permanent staffer. The Madisonians ate in the same lunch rooms as the permanents, belonged to IRD work teams and followed the same codes of dress and conduct. But they didn’t share the same security or pay. The message was clear, says Langford: “We were bottom of the barrel.”
Not enough hours. Too many hours. Hours changed without notice. No idea whether there will be work tomorrow, or how many days or weeks or months the job will last. Low and fluctuating pay. Endless temporary contracts. No protection
