Dismal employment outlook

Press, 28 February 1980, Page 19

Dismal employment outlook

Most of Wellington’s Maori middle-class could fit comfortably, and often do, into the downstairs lounge bar of a Lambton Quay hotel. Christchurch’s Maori middle class could fit with equal ease into a couple of telephone boxes. Migration to the large New Zealand cities meant for most Maoris in the last 30 years a shift from unskilled labouring on farms and roads to semiskilled work in industry. It has meant a shift from lowly paid rural underemployment or unemployment to relatively high employment at reasonable wages in the city.

Aside from those few occupants of the Wellington lounge bar or the Christchurch telephone boxes, the pattern has been broken hardly at all. Those who do break it — the occasional entrepreneur or shearing contractor turned farmer — make it into the newspapers or Country Calendar as a “credit to their race’’ — the packaging has been a bit more subtle in the last few years but

the message remains the same.

Some say that the transition from rural, unskilled labourer to semi-skilled, urb::.i, factory operative has been a difficult sup taken well — something we should applaud. Others agree but go further and ask why, for the most part, progress has stopped there.

They have a point. Although more Maoris are getting through the school system with the tickets to higher education and better jobs, the gains have not ’ been great. In 10 years the proportion of Maori children gaining University Entrance went from under one per cent to over three, but about 25 per cent of other pupils gain U.E.” Some teachers talk about the “lost generation” — those who were expected to continue the gradual progress of their parents and move another notch or so up the educational and occupational ladder — but didn't. Until the 1970 s their future had little apparent

bad effect. The damage was confined to the individual squandering of talent and brains in the plentiful supply of jobs for those who had little choice other than to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water.”

Although the supply of such jobs in the 50s and 60s was adequate for most Maoris, for a variety of reasons, it meant less than full employment. In 1956, for example, almost 3.5 per cent of the Maori work force was unemployed. By 1961, unemployment in the Maori work force was down to almost 2.5 per cent. -

With the seventies and rising unemployment throughout the country, Maoris, largely because of the kind of jobs their education had equipped them for, made up an increasingly large, and disproportionate percentage of the total unemployed. Almost 23 per cent of the unemployed in 1976 were Maori. At the time about eight per cent of the work force were Maori and almost seven

per cent of the Maori work force was unemployed. For those Maoris who go through the state school system in the next 10 or 20 years, an improvement in their performance (which no-one should bet on unless the quality of teaching improves drastically) might make a difference to unemployment figures in the future. If not. the Maori contribution to the ranks of the unemployed is likely to rise still further. For those who did not manage School Certificate and are under 21, their best chance of any kind of wage, apart from the unemployment benefit, is as ... a masseuse.

Even then, and particularly for males, the prospects are not bright. A recent survey' by an Auckland paper found that of a total of 1000 jobs advertised in one week, only 62 were suitable for anyone under 21 and without qualifications — and almost half of those 62 jobs were in massage parlours.

For the young and unskilled it is likely to get worse rather than better. The demand for unskilled workers is shrinking and is expected to continue to fall.

For the young it is bad enough already. If the general unemployment rate for Maoris is about seven per cent, the rate for young Maoris could be safely doubled — the majority of the registered unemployed are under 21 and unskilled. An unemployment rate of 14 per cent is something New Zealanders might normally associate with the black slums of the United States rather than Otara, Mangere or Porirua. If the memory stretches back far enough it also means burning and looting and a lot of simple human misery.

In the past the failures of state education have been masked by the comparatively good supply of jobs. As soon as that supply. declined the failures became obvious. It is difficult not to link

the rise in membership of the mostly Maori gangs with the rising unemployment since 1975.

Gang members would dispute the link, because most of them are employed. The nature of their jobs is revealing however. Many are supplied under the temporary work scheme, providing jobs for those who would otherwise be unemployed. The gangs, however, are just a small segment of those who have trouble finding a job, the most visible and most organised.

The rest have neither the ability nor, perhaps, the desire to make headlines. Their best chance of finding work, by doing well at school, has been blown and there are not too many second chances available.

Bright ideas on how to cope with them are few and far between. Those that have been tried are worth more support, but any suggestion that these schemes will solve more than a tiny portion of the employment problems of the Mao- is unrealistic.