It was already relieved it had been spared a Government plan covering industry in general requiring a stand-down year after a three-year period of annual working visas for workers.
The industry required overseas workers to make up more than half the Muslim slaughterers needed to meet halal requirements in meat plants and more than 75% of those on the scheme had now been coming to New Zealand for more than three years, Meat Industry Association chief executive Tim Ritchie said.
If they were required to stand-down for a year that would have set a major recruitment and training difficulty for the industry, given the physical, language and integration issues involved. Most overseas halal workers came from Fiji.
The annual recruitment visa process was very bureaucratic, covering both domestic and overseas workers, taking up a lot of time and resources, Ritchie said.
MIA spent about eight months a year, starting in December, working on it on behalf of the industry.
“We’ve been doing it for 17 years and every year it becomes more protracted and difficult.”
The Government is now imposing a general three-year maximum period before a stand-down year on the annual visa system as a way of protecting domestic employment but in reaction to submissions from industry groups concerned about a shortage of workers agreed to some sector and regional dispensations and they covered the meat industry.
Meat companies needed about 240 halal slaughterers every year and got about 100 from NZ after quite a lengthy period of advertising in newspapers and at mosques.
The industry’s strong preference was to employ NZ resident workers but there was a sustained shortfall every year with most Muslims living in the major cities and not many being attracted to rural areas where most processing plant were based, Ritchie said.
Every year MIA had to put a new case to Immigration NZ to enable overseas recruitment.
There was no special immigration programme to enable the industry to easily fill the shortfall and the current generic scheme just made it more difficult, he said.
Ideally, the industry would like the Government to put halal slaughterers on the long-term skill shortage list.
“The system we have is a bit like shooting ourselves in the foot,’’ Ritchie said.
“The Government talks about the need to increase exports and has regulations governing how the industry is run to meet halal requirements but then we make it hard to get the workers for the trade.
“We think we’ll get something better in the end but there’s nothing agreed or negotiated and we are starting on the back foot.”
The halal slaughter system was a key part of the NZ meat export trade. Only about 1% of industry workers were halal certified but 90% of animals were processed as halal.
In 2016 about 25% of total meat exports, worth about $1.5 billion, were halal certified, by agencies independent of the meat companies, including the Federation of Islamic Associations of NZ.
Muslim countries required livestock to be killed by halal slaughterers. The requirement did not apply to downstream processes.
Other countries had Muslim customers who could request halal certification. China was an example and its 23 million Muslims were NZ’s biggest halal market.
