Meat Industry Association (MIA) chief executive Sirma Karapeeva says the industry is already short about 2500 people, including halal slaughtermen, skilled boners and butchers who have previously been recruited from overseas.
The staffing issue meant plants could not run at full capacity last season.
“What is new now is that it’s been made worse because of covid-19 and the borders being shut, meaning we can’t supplement the workforce with skilled migrant workers as we have previously been able to do,” Karapeeva said.
A government reset of immigration laws coincides with the industry needing 250 halal slaughtermen alone.
She says there are about 100 New Zealand residents or migrants here on visas who qualify to do the work.
“It is a $3 billion value-added industry and we have no other way of capturing that value,” she said.
The industry cannot employ just anyone to perform that role and this year at the prompting of the Labour Party’s Wigram MP Megan Woods, the meat industry held a recruitment drive among the Christchurch muslim community, who Woods says some of whom were looking for work.
They did not get any takers.
“The industry can train people to do physical work but we cannot do that for religious affiliation,” she said.
Karapeeva says the recent tightening of immigration rules will mean more meat cuts will be exported in a primary or unprocessed form and less edible offal and other products will be recovered.
The lowest wages paid by the industry are well above the minimum wage, she says, but most jobs were in regional areas, which did not suit everyone.
The mismatch between where the labour pool exists in cities such as Auckland and vacancies in regional NZ, is not easily resolved.
“It’s not as simple as making a job available and people will come,” she said.
Government officials have said the industry needs to adopt more technology, but Karapeeva says some meat processing jobs will always be labour intensive, new technology takes time to develop and has to take account of variability among animal carcases.
“We have made progress but the next wave of automation is a while away,” she said.
To assist with recruitment, the association is launching a recruitment website to promote the many and varied roles offered by the industry, but the reliance on foreign workers will remain.
She says it is unlikely the industry will be able to recruit enough people locally, so is continuing to lobby the Government to access those with specialist skills from overseas, an agreement the industry has previously had with the Government prior to the covid-19 pandemic.
