Tim Maloney, the head of AUT’s economics department, said the recession had hit the United States – which traditionally recorded lower rates of unemployment than many other industrialised nations – particularly hard.

“The [US] housing market has just collapsed, and there are a lot of people who have just come out of university and simply can’t find jobs,” Maloney said.

The unemployment rate for United States was 2.7 percentage points higher than New Zealand’s last December, at 10 per cent.

“The biggest difference [between the US and New Zealand] is that our financial sector is much more concentrated,” said Maloney.

“We have many fewer banks and our regulation system is much stronger.”

He said Americans had suffered because their regulatory system had let them down.

Britain had a jobless rate of 7.8 per cent in December, while Canada recorded unemployment at 8.4 per cent.

Maloney said the close alignment between the Canadian and US economies was the major cause Canada’s higher-than-usual unemployment rate. Before the recession hit Canada had an unemployment rate of around 6 per cent.

He said some European job markets had been particularly hard hit by the recession.

“Spain in particular has been really badly hurt. I think their unemployment rate was over 20 per cent last time I checked.”

Australia came in with a lower December jobless rate of 5.5 per cent.

Maloney said Australia had surprised the world community by how well it had fared during the recession.

“[Australia] reacted very quickly to the recession,” he said.

Japan recorded a lower unemployment rate than New Zealand in December, at 5.1 per cent.

Maloney said Japan’s current rate of unemployment was “outrageously high” when compared with its levels – which have been close to zero per cent – in the past.

Hong Kong’s unemployment levels sat at 4.9 per cent last December, while South Korea’s jobless rate was just 3.5 per cent in the same month.

Eastern European countries recorded much higher unemployment rates than New Zealand in December. Unemployment in Hungary sat at 10.5 per cent, while 11.9 per cent of Poles faced joblessness late last year.

Surprisingly, Russia was doing a lot better than some of its eastern bloc neighbours, with jobless rate of 8.2 per cent last October.

Some Asian economies were doing better than New Zealand on the employment front.

Hong Kong’s unemployment levels sat at 4.9 per cent last December, while South Korea’s jobless rate was just 3.5 per cent in the same month.

Maloney said those were much higher levels of unemployment than the two “Tiger Economies” had experienced in the past.

Mexico recorded an unemployment rate of just 5.4 per cent last December, while Venezuela had a rate of 6.6 per cent and Brazil 6.8 per cent.

Maloney said Mexico had benefited from its North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) membership, which meant many US firms had shifted their operations south of the border, creating many new jobs.

When compared with the unemployment rates in some of the world’s poorest nations, especially those in Africa, New Zealand has much to be thankful for.

Even before the global downturn, the small war ravaged West African country of Liberia recorded a unemployment rate of 85 per cent in 2003.

Zimbabwe had an unemployment rate of 80 per cent in 2005, while the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru topped the world statistics with a jobless rate of 90 per cent recorded in 2004.

An International Labour Agency report released at the end of January warned that worldwide unemployment had reached a historic high – with 212 million people unemployed last year, or 6.6 per cent of the global workforce.

Thirty-eight million people around the world became unemployed in 2008 and 2009, the report said, and the situation in Europe was most likely to deteriorate further before a recovery could begin.

Easing the Way

The Household Labour Force Survey said the number of unemployed people rose to 168,000 during the December 2009 quarter, taking the unemployment rate to 7.3 per cent, its highest level since June 1999.

The jump in the unemployment rate was largely due to an increase in the number of people entering the labour force but who were unable to find work.

The number of unemployed 15 to 24-year-olds rose by 6.4 percentage points to 18.4 per cent.

The unemployment rate for Maori reached 15.4 per cent during the quarter compared with 4.6 per cent for European.

Social Development Minister Paula Bennett pointed to an increase of 14,500 people in the working age population.

“There are simply more people joining the workforce, which is outstripping job growth,” said Bennett.

“Net migration is part of this picture. New Zealanders are coming home and staying home, choosing to ride out a global recession in New Zealand.”

Bennett said the number of those in work dropped by 2000, a marked improvement on the previous quarter which saw a decrease of 16,000 people in work.

The result is higher than that forecast by Treasury, Reserve Bank and the Labour Department.

“As most economists will tell you, employment almost always lags behind economic growth, but we’re not out of the woods yet and every job that’s lost has a significant impact on workers and their families.

“Having said that, New Zealand has fared better than many other countries. We are still well below the OECD average of 8.6 per cent unemployment,” said Bennett.

“Work and Income’s focus on job matching has meant about a third of those applying for a benefit over the last three months didn’t end up needing one.”

The number of job vacancies listed with Work and Income remained high and the Job Ops and Community Max schemes have had an impact on keeping young New Zealanders in work, she said.

“Through Job Ops and Community Max, more than 5000 young people have found work. That’s 5000 young people participating in the workforce and the community, instead of being on a benefit,” Bennett said.

The number of people receiving the unemployment benefit rose by 3 per cent, last month to 68,369. The forecast for the end of January was 70,000.

The increase over the same period last year was 12 per cent.

“It’s an indicator that we are nearing an inevitable turning point, but we still have a way to go before benefit numbers return to pre-recession levels”

The number of those who went off the unemployment benefit and into work last month was 3851, the largest positive movement in the month of January since 2005.

Easing the Way

The Herald reported a 15 to 20 per cent increase in job advertisements this year compared with the beginning of last year.

Advertising manager Greg Hornblow said the Herald’s advertising section had had its “best start” to the year since 2005.

“That middle-management – 60 to 90k base salary – seems to be where the growth has been this year,” he said.

Hornblow said across all sectors covered by the Herald’s listings there was “more hiring going on.”

Keith Muirhead, the head of Trade Me Jobs, said the website had 7373 job listings yesterday – an 11 per cent increase from last year’s peak of 6647 jobs on October 9.

He said job listings had been “building solidly” over the last month.

BNZ Capital senior economist Craig Ebert said while any increase in job listings was a positive sign, care had to be taken when comparing new figures with those from last year.

“The thing to bear in mind is that this time a year ago was a time of intense distress, so you have to be careful about comparing any rates of change,” said Ebert.

“[Any change] is coming off an extremely low base.”

He said too few jobs were becoming available for new entrants into the labour market.

“If these people can’t be absorbed, it’s kind of like a game of musical chairs where you keep taking away the chairs and more people are left standing, unemployed,” Ebert said.

Muirhead said sectors such as engineering, accounting and transport/logistics had seen a fall in Trade Me listings, while listings for front-line bank staff, building-related trades, business development managers and senior sales professionals had increased.

From a regional perspective, Gisborne, Marlborough, the West Coast, Hawkes Bay and Otago all saw listings increase by around 20 per cent last year, he said.

Muirhead said the Wellington region was one of the hardest hit in the second half of 2009, with a 7.4 per cent reduction in listings compared with the first half of the year.

He said the decrease in Wellington listings was mostly due to Government departments “tightening their belts”.

Other regions which saw a reductions in listings last year included Southland, Nelson/Tasman, Taranaki, Manawatu and Wanganui.

Auckland accounted for 42 per cent of all listings, with Wellington at 22 per cent and Canterbury at 11.7 per cent, Muirhead added.

Seek general manager Annemarie Duff said from July to December last year the number of new job advertisements placed on the website increased every month, with overall growth of 16 per cent.

New January figures presented an even more positive outlook – with a 10.9 per cent growth in new jobs listings for the month, she said.

“Overall the seek employment index, which compares demand and supply for labour is up by 6.7 per cent, showing that there is an improved market for candidates,” Duff said.

“Auckland leads this change at 12 per cent with Wellington slightly behind at 4.6 per cent. Things are more challenging for job seekers in Christchurch, though, where increased numbers of available candidates provide a tougher employment market.”

Easing the Way

There were 341,300 visitors in December, the highest ever recorded in one month, and a 6 per cent increase over the previous record of 322,200 in December 2008.

Visitor figures have increased in seven of the last nine months over the same months in previous years.

The December increase was driven by 14,000 more Australian visitors, along with 2800 more visitors from the United States and 1200 more from Singapore. However, visitors from China were down by 2300.

There were 2.458 million visitors in total last year, similar to 2008 levels but down from 2007.

Australian visitors were up 106,500, an 11 per cent increase, but there were fewer visitors from the United Kingdom, Korea, Japan, the US and China.

New Zealand residents went on slightly fewer overseas trips last year, with 1.918 million short-term departures, down 2 per cent on 2008.

The number of New Zealanders moving overseas also decreased last year, with permanent and long-term departures down by 18,500, including 15,700 fewer to Australia.

New Zealand’s overall migration balance was a gain of 21,300, the highest since 2004, when there was a gain of 22,000.

Easing the Way

Silver Fern Policies

On 25 November 2009, the Minister of Immigration announced two new policies (see the announcement) the Silver Fern Job Search policy and the Silver Fern Practical Experience policy. These policies are designed to bring young skilled people into New Zealand, and come into effect in April 2010.

Full details of these policies will be available here closer to the implementation date. The basic requirements are set out below.

Silver Fern Job Search

The Silver Fern Job Search policy will allow people to enter New Zealand for nine months to search for skilled employment. There will be a limit of 300 places per year.

To be eligible an applicant must:

• apply using the online application system
• be outside of New Zealand
• be aged between 20 and 35
• hold a recognised qualification which is either a:
  • bachelor degree or higher, or
  • trade qualification and a minimum of two years’ work experience in that trade
• meet the English language requirement set out in the Skilled Migrant Category
• have enough funds to support themselves during their stay.

The application process and payment will be online. Applicants will have to provide evidence they meet the requirements to an Immigration New Zealand branch for assessment and verification.

Silver Fern Practical Experience

Holders of Silver Fern Job Search Visas who successfully find skilled employment in New Zealand may apply for a Silver Fern Practical Experience Visa/Permit. This will allow them to work in that employment for up to two years.

To be eligible an applicant must:

• hold a Silver Fern Job Search Visa
• have an offer of skilled employment as defined under the Skilled Migrant Category
• hold occupational registration if it is required for the job.

There will be no annual limit to the number of people who can apply under the Silver Fern Practical Experience Permit.

Easing the Way

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International Advisor

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New Zealand accepts about 1000 refugees a year. These people come from increasingly diverse ethnicities. Many struggle to establish new lives in New Zealand. Their keenness to contribute to New Zealand life is hampered by unemployment and lack of acceptance.

When I arrived in New Zealand eight years ago, I had been a refugee for 17 years. I thought on arriving here that here was the end to my life as a refugee.

And it is. Because now I have a country I can call home. That is hugely important to me.

But there are ways in which I still feel like a refugee. Many new issues arise as we former refugees re-establish our lives here.

First, we refugees arrive in New Zealand as individuals. It is extraordinarily hard to settle when one’s loved ones are left behind in dangerous or unknown conditions.

We nearly all come from collectivist cultures. When you come from a collectivist culture, your identity comes from your place in the community. It is like we are one body, and can only function effectively when all our parts and all our processes work properly.

In individualist cultures, the emphasis is on each person being independent – functioning fully on their own.

For most of us, we are more concerned at first with the survival of those we have left behind. Even people on benefits will send as much money as they can back to those they have left behind.

As well as that, people lucky enough to be in New Zealand (only 1 per cent of the world’s refugees are given homes in other countries) are desperate to have their husbands or wives, children and parents join them. This is a very expensive and difficult process.

Many of us have to learn English when we arrive. This is a major hurdle in our integration here – English is one of the most difficult languages to learn. To survive while we are learning English, we rely on volunteers to help us catch a bus or buy food at the supermarket.

And we rely on building our own communities so we can speak to others who share our languages and cultural practices. This is an essential part of being able to feel at home here.

There are huge difficulties for us in building communities out of often very disparate people with very few resources. Imagine if you are forced to flee – alone – to an area of bush in Otago – and you find yourself among a group of people, none of whom you know, and who come from a wide range of backgrounds.

How do you go about deciding who the leaders are? Whose religion will dominate? How do you decide on the rules to share land and food by?

We refugee communities face all these issues. We have to minimise them by building trust and relationships among and between the refugee communities. Some of our communities are very small – there are only two Colombian refugees in New Zealand. And there are very few Rwandans.

So we work hard to build relationships among refugees from different ethnicities, struggling to communicate with each other in a language that is foreign to all of us. Then there are the different religions, cultural beliefs and practices to contend with. And all of us are trying to learn how New Zealand systems work.

The biggest struggle is to sit in a room with people whose families have been fighting your family. For example, imagine if you are Rwandan and a Hutu and the only other Rwandan family locally is a Tutsi family.

Somehow these people have to work through their experiences of the 1994 genocide that ruined their lives and their country so that they can work together to survive here. There is so little trust – so much forgiveness is needed to build bridges.

But we are doing it. Our communities are building. And our networks are building. We now have regional networks and we have a national collective voice that is called the New Zealand National Refugee Network.

When we refugees began to talk together, we left many meetings without any agreement, except to come back again. And when we did this, we continued our disagreements. It took years of challenging ourselves, and testing our strength, and learning about each other very deeply. Now we can work together on our common issues.

Our communities are still fragile. But our collective voice is getting stronger.

Now we find our biggest problem is people who have helped us wanting to control us. As we get stronger we discover, as have women, Maori, Pacific and others before us, that our “helpers” don’t want us to stand on our own feet. They want to keep helping us.

We know our needs. What we need is for our supporters to listen carefully to us so they can use their resources effectively to help us achieve our goal of full participation in New Zealand life.

Adam Awad, a former refugee from Somalia, is president of the Wellington Somali Association, chairman of ChangeMakers Refugee Forum and secretary of the New Zealand National Refugee Network. This article is based on his keynote speech at the recent National Refugee Wellbeing Conference in Auckland.

Easing the Way

The country has gained more than net 20,000 permanent and long term (PLT) migrants during 2009 after a net 2,501 PLT migrants arrived during November. This brought the total net arrivals during the calendar year to the end of November to 19,882.

Departures fell 27 per cent in November from a year ago, while arrivals fell 2.4 per cent.

The year to November 2009 had the highest permanent and long-term net migration since the year to July 2004, figures released by Statistics New Zealand show. There were 20,021 net arrivals in the 12 months to November, up from 3,569 in the year to November 2008.

The Reserve Bank and housing forecasters watch net migration figures closely for an indication of housing demand given previous influxes have helped drive up house prices through 2002, 2003 and 2004, although previous influxes were driven more by arrivals rather than a lack of departures.

Seasonally adjusted figures show net PLT migration dropped off slightly to 1,780 in November from 2,140 October. This was up from net departures of 10 (seasonally adjusted) in November 2008.

Easing the Way

The survey indicates that employers in all industry sectors and all regions are reporting a more upbeat hiring pace for the first quarter of 2010.

521 New Zealand employers were surveyed.

The Outlook confirms that employer confidence is on the rise, with a substantial increase after four successive quarters of mostly disappointing projections. This is due to a rise in the proportion of employers planning to increase hiring (20 per cent, up from 14 per cent in Q.4) and a fall in the number who plan to decrease workforce numbers (six per cent, compared to 13 per cent in Q.4).

Whilst there is still a long way to go before hiring intentions reach the boom-time forecasts seen in 2007, the first quarter survey indicates the strongest employer hiring intentions since Q.3 in 2008.

“These results are good news and suggest that the New Zealand job market has not only stabilised, but is preparing for recovery. New Zealand employers are gradually gaining confidence on the back of more positive economic news,” said Chris Riley, General Manager, Sales & Marketing, Manpower New Zealand.

“The New Zealand job market looks as if it is set to gain momentum in the early part of 2010, with employers gearing up for growth and on the hunt for the right people to drive that growth. Now is the time for employers to develop strategies to attract and retain the talent they will need to push their business forward.“

Hiring expectations are strongest in the Wholesale and Retail Trade sector. Employers in the Public Administration and Education sector posted the weakest hiring expectations. Across the board, the Outlook for each sector has improved quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year.

The job market recovery is spreading across the nation, with all New Zealand regions posting a positive employment outlook for the first time in over a year. The most significant boost in optimism was seen in Christchurch. Employers in Auckland and Wellington weren’t far behind, however.

Riley points to recent Manpower research that revealed the drivers of employee attraction and retention. “Competitive pay, career opportunities, work-life balance and management quality should be focus points for organisations looking to keep existing employees and attract new talent.

“On the other hand, employers who do nothing will see a rise in staff churn in 2010, as employees pluck up the courage to move on to new opportunities.“

Easing the Way

Immigration Minister Jonathan Coleman said the new Silver Fern visa, to be implemented in April next year, aimed to attract the young and highly-skilled.

“In the global competition for skills, we need to encourage young, career-minded people to choose New Zealand as a long term destination.”

“It is important to acknowledge that migration is a key economic enabler. It gives New Zealand businesses international connections and provides skills to transform our economic landscape. However, it’s all about attracting the right skills and matching those skills with the employment needs of our economy.”

Under the policy, young people with proven potential will be able to come to New Zealand for up to nine months to seek skilled employment.

Once employed, they will then be issued with a further permit to stay another two years while they apply for residence.

“The policy is designed so that people who meet the requirements upfront will be likely candidates for residence under the skilled migrant category,” Dr Coleman said.

The policy targets those between 20 and 35 and will have an initial limit of 300.

In other changes to work policy taking effect on Monday, Immigration New Zealand said the minimum income threshold of $33,675 for essential-skills work-permit holders before their children can be considered domestic students was not meant to stop children of migrant workers from attending school.

“The policy is not designed to prohibit children from attending school, but to ensure that parents who wish to bring their children to New Zealand while they work on an essential skills work permit will have the income necessary to care for their children,” said Lesley Haines, acting head of Immigration New Zealand.

These children could apply to study as international students, who pay annual school fees upwards of $10,000.

But Ms Haines said they were unlikely to be able to afford it.

“It is most unlikely that any parent earning less than $33,675 would be able to afford international student fees and expenses for their children.”

“However, if they can afford to, the children will be assessed under student policy,” she added.

Immigration New Zealand will also make changes to its long-term skills-shortage list from today.

Six occupations – boat builder, fitter, air conditioning and refrigerator mechanic, fruit or nut grower, market gardener and mixed crop farmer – are no longer deemed to be in long-term shortage and have been removed from the list.

But five new occupations – physicist, life scientist, medical oncologist, supply and distribution manager and diesel motor mechanic – have been added to it.

Employers wanting to recruit migrants in occupations not on the list can still do so if the employer is able to demonstrate that no suitable New Zealanders are available in that location to fill the job, Immigration New Zealand said.

Easing the Way

Salaries in New Zealand have so far had a soft landing, but the lag effect of the global financial crisis combined with rising unemployment and a decreasing demand for labour indicates a slowdown in salaries growth is inevitable in 2010, Mercer said.

National salaries for those who remained in the same job in the 12 months to July rose 5.2 per cent, down slightly from a rise of 5.4 per cent the year prior.

Public sector salaries rose by 5.3 per cent, compared to 3.8 per cent in the private sector.

Wellington experienced the highest rate of salary growth, with same incumbent pay rising by 5.2 per cent in the 12 months to July 2009, compared with 5.9 per cent in 2008.

Auckland employees have seen less generous pay increases, rising by 3.8 per cent from 4.8 per cent in 2008.

Executives received an increase of 5 per cent this year, down from the 5.9 per cent last year and professionals saw the lowest pay movements at 3.4 per cent, down from a 5.8 per cent pay rise in 2008.

David Little, a senior associate at Mercer, said salaries typically lagged behind economic and labour market conditions because of the timetable for budgets.

“Competition for jobs is going to become fierce with limited new jobs being created, involuntary turnover increasing and unemployment on the rise,” Mr Little said.

- NZPA

Easing the Way