Farm Labour Shortage

Even with the current economic uncertainty, if you think the skilled worker shortage problem was all Covid driven and will self correct over time, then think again.

Australia’s labour shortage has been building for some time and it’s not just confined to our shores, it’s a problem being experienced across the developed world and it’s here to stay.

Let me give you some examples, in the United States, there are currently around 11 million job?vacancies, but only 6.5 million workers listed as unemployed, UK employers were struggling to fill over 1.2 million open jobs before Putin intervened and shut off the gas, Singapore has 163 job vacancies?for every 100 available candidates and Malaysia has over 2.1 million foreign workers and still has labour shortages.

?According to a recent study, 87% of global employers admit that they are currently struggling with skills gaps issues, which is probably why your machinery dealer is telling you that the wait on new equipment is anything up to two years.

?At our current unemployment rate of 3.4% Australia has 400,000 unfilled jobs which is pushing wage rates up.

?Adding to the pressure every school graduate thinks they are worth $35 an hour, every apprentice is thinking of quitting and taking a job on the mines and every office worker wants more flexi time so they can work from home.?All of it adds to the gaps in the workforce.

?So, what’s driving this worker shortage when the globe has just ticked over 8 billion people and a quarter of them speak English and many would move to take a higher paying job.?

The first and obvious point is most of the globe’s population reside in developing countries and it’s not that easy to walk, swim or paddle across borders into a developed country to fill the jobs vacuum that exists.

For those that do make it, there is the challenge of getting a working visa or green card to make them legal. For those lucky enough to navigate that challenge there is the need to have the language skills to work as the bell boy, the technical skills to work on the front desk or the qualifications to be a chef.

Jump all those hurdles and the barriers into the job market still remain strong. Unions work hard to ensure the demand part of the labour equation always outstrips supply, think of the efforts the waterfront unions go to keep people out of their lucrative closed shop, or professional unions like the AMA (Australian Medial Association) to take to limit numbers.

Even for those who get past the unions there is always specific Australian qualifications that are needed in the form of the growing number of safety tickets or passing the local licensing exams all of which help reduce the numbers of skilled workers.

Even semi skilled occupations have barriers to entry, for example to drive a road train you need to have held a car license for three years and a heavy ridged license for a year.

?Then there is the simple fact that some jobs are just not appealing to the millennial generation, again road truck driving, even with annual salaries of between $100,000 and $120,000 there are few takers from the post Generation Ys (1996), in part this is because the lifestyle does not appeal to a younger generation.?

Life on the road is not the calling it used to be, nor is life in the bush, or the appeal of a country town (unless its Margaret River or Byron Bay), which means attracting people to move from the big city to take up jobs in the regions is yet another challenge.

To this we can add another part of the labor shortage equation that both Australia and the whole of the western world is grappling with, which is an aging population.

?Interesting fact, without net overseas migration adding 1% a year to Australia’s population base since 1947, our population today would have flatlined around the post war number of 7.5 million people.?

?Realising we did not have the numbers to build our own planes, tanks and ships to fight the next war the labor government at the time put in place the ‘Population or Perish’ policy with a 2% growth target giving us 10 million by the mid 1960s. The white Australia policy was alive and well to the embarrassment of today’s labor, with Caldwell wanting 9 out of 10 coming from the UK.

The program saw migrants coming in through the ‘Assisted Migration Scheme’ which included the ‘Ten Pound Pom’ program, the discredited ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Child Migrant’ schemes plus the displaced war refugee relocation program that saw around 2.5 million people come to Australia between 1947 and 1970.

Today Australia is the second most multicultural country in the world after Israel with 5.5 million people born overseas.?Without this influx we would have had one of the oldest population cohorts in the world, a problem that is now common across the western world where the average age back in 1960 was 30 years old, growing to 40 by 2000 and now heading for 50 in 2060. ?

?Aging populations have declining workforces and less military aged people to conscript, which is why Russia and China are on the warpath while they can muster the numbers to fill the ranks.

?This aging trend is what will eventually cap the global population by about 2080 at around 10 billion, with studies estimating that by 2030, one in six people in the world will be aged 65 or over?and by 2050, one in three.

?Add to that the rapid fall in births in countries that have hit middle income status post 2000 and we have the combined effects of an aging population and a declining replacement rate hitting the available global workforce.

?By 2050, China’s working population will drop by 20%, and in Japan the working population is expected to fall by 40%, to these two you can add Korea and most of Western Europe which between them make up over 70% of the world’s high tech manufacturing capacity.

?According to UN and World Bank statistics, 75 countries already have fertility rates that fall well below the replacement rate of 2.1%, and those countries that are growing are not exactly known for the manufacturing prowess think Nigeria, Egypt, Pakistan, Angola, Congo etc.?

?In the old days you could pick a country pull someone off the street, shove them in a factory and out the other end would come a tractor, but those days are long gone.

?Today the vast array of electronics in everything has complicated, already complicated machines and narrowed the field of people and countries interested and capable of being able to manufacture modern equipment.

?On the local front we need people who can fix new as well as the old machinery. As the old time mechanics drop out of the workforce we run out of people with the skills to pull the back end off a a relatively simple 1970s chamberlain.?

?This does not bode well for the next generation of farm machinery which is full of electronics. Who is going to be able to fix all this gear as its goes down the ranks to smaller farmers or becomes backup equipment. Its unlikely to be someone coming in from South Sudan as a new migrant.

?By the end of this decade there will be few people in the Wheatbelt with the skills to find the electronic problem in a 30 year old 2000 model tractor.

?Besides if they do good luck finding the parts. ?Bigger more complex 300 – 700hp machines have replaced 100 – 300 hp machines, we can replace the drivers with automation, but will we be able to find the technicians to fix them.

?In a recent report?by the OECD, they found that Australia is second only to Canada in its shortage of skilled labor, so we are at the forefront of what is a global problem. ?

With drop out rates of apprenticeships sitting at 50% and the universities taking between 56% of graduates ACT and 44% WA our hands on mechanical skills shortage is set to grow.

In the old days 15 year olds new that their only ticket out of a country town was on the end of a hand piece or via a apprenticeship, but now 17 year olds can pick and choose what they do including enter university with no ATAR and aspire to the life of being a Inclusivity and Diversity HR Manager.

Anyone who wants a office job these days can get one so why put yourself through a 4 year apprenticeship to end up outside on the tools.

No longer do we have high levels of youth unemployment helping to drive people into apprenticeships and training in careers that are hard on the body.?

When one in five youth back in the 1980s was unemployed the incentive existed to go get trained up so they were employable, but when the unemployment level falls to one in thirty you are scraping the bottom of the barrel and its then that regional, rural, hot, dirty, hard, boring, low paid jobs are left unfulfilled no matter how much they offer as a pathway to future self-employment or a big income.?

What’s that mean for Australian agriculture, well it means we will remain short of workers unless we can convince the government to change the model of migration and rerun the population or perish program along with targeting migrants with visas linked to the regions.

Failing that we need to open up Australia to many more semi permanent visas making it easy for motivated Indians, South Africans, Filipinos, Pacific Islanders who are semi skilled and skilled to come in on 4 year visas linked to jobs in the bush. This is the formula the Middle East offers its workers, albeit we would not be seeking to exploit them as they do.

The other thing we need to do is find a new way to fast track our youth through skilled apprenticeships, if four years is too long to suffer through a trade then the government should be offering full time intensive two year courses in specific high tech areas related to mining and agriculture to train up technicians in the machinery skills which we are needing to fill the workforce gaps.?

The State government should be using the new $10m training facility they build at Muresk and pushing through 100 graduates a year in intensive hands on courses, they wont be match fit like a 4 year apprentice but they will be well on their way to being useful to an employer.?With luck some may even stay on and elect to live and work in a country town and not take a job on the mines.

Without policy changes to attract and hold people in the bush the skilled shortage will continue to get worse.

Where are the Indian and Chinese Graduates

I was talking to an Indian uber driver the other night and he was telling me had been in Australia five years completing an economics and international relations degree but was yet to find a desk job even through he was now an Australian citizen.

Not surprising as there are few jobs demanding those qualifications (same as mine), a reflection on the fact that our universities are conning international students by offering degrees in careers that largely don’t exist but their degree helps get them into Australia. Interestingly in his time in Australia my uber driver had no idea what was on offer in the real world of jobs and in fact had never left Perth to see what existed outside of the metropolitan area. ??

He had no idea about wheat in the Wheatbelt, did not know that there was gold in the Goldfields or ore in the Pilbara, he was totally clueless about jobs outside of working in service stations or driving a uber.

Its but one example but the very fact that we are not seeing Indians and Chinese driving trucks and chaser bins or standing in the que wearing fluro at Perth airport or waving spanners in workshops, which tells me we have been importing migrants that are on the whole not suited for primary industries or the trades.

While the WA State government is good at marketing to attract the 50,000 foreign uni students into the state to study here, they do a very poor job or educating them about future career and job opportunities should they elect to follow through and become a permanent resident.??This is a failure of the state government as our biggest migrant cohort now is Chinese and Indian students who have gone through our university system to become service station attendants

Pacific Island Labour Scheme?(PALM)

The federal labor governments move to dump the previous governments Ag Visa and replace it with an expanded Pacific Islander Labour Mobility Scheme program is well underway.

There are currently 32,500 unskilled and semi skilled workers PALM in Australia and another 40,000 pre approved ready to go and the scheme is uncapped.?Horticultural farmers on the East Coast have been using them for years moving them from being on an annual 9 month rotation to the permanent four year visa and training them up as their lead tractor, sprayer, even truck drivers as many having been machinery operators at home.

Harvey Beef has been hiring PALM workers through the scheme and other sectors such as regional aged care providers are also picking up workers and putting them through Cert 4 training to fill regional gaps. www.palmscheme.gov.au

Wheatbelt farmers in need of permanent workers should explore the scheme as feedback from grain and sugar cane farmers over east is they provide good reliable workers.

Farmers don’t have to go through employment agents, you can set up as a sponsored employer which is pretty simple. The govt has a list of grain and livestock farms who have done this if you want to get their experience.

You can also at short notice go through existing employment agents, the only requirements are the usual ones about being regionally based, paying the award rates, charging fair rent, ensuring accommodation being of minimum health standards etc, eg no slum lords or wage slave employers need apply. ?Horticulture has some bad operators which the government has gone after.?

Grower groups and councils could be taking a lead and become employing agents for the district and work to attract suitably skilled machinery workers (eg ex mine / road workers) and bring their whole families over.?The government pays for their schooling.?Once here they will help fill your local school, sporting clubs, churches, shops, bushfire brigade etc.?They are literally going to be the future of regional Australia as the labour shortage is here to [email protected].