Opportunities through Ponsonby Work Trust

Press, 28 February 1980, Page 19

Opportunities through Ponsonby Work Trust

Conversation at the Ponsonby Work Trust’s headquarters in less-than-elegant Pollen Street would not have been out of place at last year’s National Party conference in Christchurch.

“Economic downturn,’’ “independence.” “incentives,” “the benefits of risk” ... the buzz words of free enterprise were mixed in with a fair dollop of commercial jargon . . “cash flow,” “quotes,” “loan finance” etc.

The ever-present problem of paying the tax man. the latest jump in the. price of concrete and the normal nightmare of the small subcontractor — “when am I going to get paid’’ — are also touched on briefly. Members of the trust, however, might look a little out of place at the conference. The majority are Maori or from the smaller Pacific Islands. Many have spent time in Her Majesty’s prisons, borstals or detention centres. Some have also done time in gangs.

When the trust was started, early in' 1976, many of the founders had not long been out of prison and with rising unemployment there was every chance that they would return in a few months time.

“Most lacked marketable skills,’’ says a trust member, Ewen Derrick, a little wryly.

Since then, the trust has had its ups and downs. More than 200 people have worked for it and

weekly payments to members have gone as low as $3O.

Lots of lessons have been learned in those four years. These days the trust works with a hardcore of about 15 members and the lessons are the past provide the hard,earned code they work by. For most, options outside the trust are limited Temporary employment or unemployment sums it up for the majority. If there are jobs available the odds are that with few recognised skills they won’t do much better than an assembly line.

There is a certain security to the latter — a pay packet every week and not much risk. But if it is the only kind of job you have ever had, and the prospect of another stint is hateful, it is not much of an option.

The work trust means opportunities for most. A chance to decide the work they will do, how it gets negotiated and completed and the possibility of picking up some worthwhile and “marketable skills” at the same time.

One of the first hard lessons that trust members learned was that trying to do it your own way is not easy. In the beginning, with help from the Government temporary work scheme, jobs were not difficult to come by, but as unemployment grew so did the numbers who wanted to work for the trust.

“We just couldn’t cope,’’ said Ewen Derrick. More

people meant pressure to find more jobs. The more jobs, the larger the work gangs and the more men-

ial and rigid the tasks they could tackle. “It was slave labour — the jobs absolutely no-one else would take on,” said Ewen Derrick. As the trust became more successful and attracted more members, they found themselves back on the treadmill they wanted to escape from.

When the supply of work slackened, wages, already quite low, went down ’ still further. Dependence on one source of work, provided by the Government, meant chaos when big jobs ended. In one case 40 trust members were given a day’s notice from one work scheme project.. The trust then had no power. Members worked under the authority ■ of others, the trust was merely an avenue through which members wre paid — the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.

Many members drifted back into the dole queues and to gangs, many of which were employed on similar large-scale work schemes. Those with families had little choice. However much you try, $3O is not enough for a family, even a small one, to live on in Auckland.

“That’s one of the.great disappointments,” said Ewen Derrick. “We once had people from every different gang but with the lack of work they went back to mixing with the

gang only and the divisions tightened up.” Many of those in the present hard-core stayed. They did not want to register as unemployed and in spite of making only $3O or $4O a week, the factory still did not look inviting.

Instead of relying on Government work, the remaining members decided to go it alone and move into the private sector — quoting, contracting for, and most important of all, controlling their own work.

Things went well at first. With a smaller group, jobs were more manageable and more complex tasks could be undertaken. Skills in concreting, crib wall construction and painting were built up and the trust could branch into more interesting and lucrative jobs.

Above all, the trust was much easier to run. Fifteen was about the maximum number of people who could fit comfortably into the.front room of the headquarters at Pollen Street and discuss what the group was going to do next, how they were going to do it and the likely problems they would encounter. That number allowed most members to make a contribution to the running of the trust.

But. like most small businesses, the last few ■years have not been especially kind. As private work became harder and harder to get the trust was forced into a compromise of sorts with the Department of Labour. This time around the conditions are more to their liking.

As with their private work, the trust is now the employer of labour and the contractor to the Department of Labour or the local body for whom it is working. This allows trust members to work at the pace they choose within the terms of the contract. They can make more money by finishing sooner or take the consequences of going over the allotted time.

With steadier work and a slightly more regular income the trust has been able to build up not just a bank of marketable skills but an impressive collection of equipment and machinery- as well. The headquarters now boasts a reasonably well equipped workshop. Much of the machinery was bought as junk and refurbished and reconditioned by trust members.

The workshop gives those members with skills on particular equipment, welding for example, the chance to pass on, in an informal way, their skills to other members of the group. It is also a help in the ■ trust’s latest experiment, the manufacture of wooden toys. No-one knows whether the toymaking venture will work but it does show that the trust is confident enough of its ability to survive to enjoy the luxury of experiment.

The trust’s success has been recognised. Probation officers constantly ring the headquarters to see if any of their charges can be taken in. The recidivism rate for trust members -is close- to 10 per cent, compared with the

usual rate of around 70 per cent. It is unlikely that groups like the trust will prove to be a solution to any problems larger than that of their own members. Such groups seem to work best when they are informally organised from the ground up rather than directed from the top down.

At the moment, the Ponsonby Trust cannot and will not accept more than one or t w o members. If they did, they fear the return of man>' of the problems from the past.

Their accounts, written on large blackboards in the front room at Pollen Street, show that they are an active if precarious enterprise. In the four months before my visit they had paid out almost $19,000 in wages and bills. There is a tax bill of $lOOO yet to pay and an overdraft — because of cash flow problems — of more than $3OOO. Problems persist. The price of a truckload of cement seems to rise every day. The ailing truck used for carting people and tools from one job to another looks set to expire near the end of the year and the money for a replacement is not in sight. Such problems are critical for an enterprise as small as the trust. But, like the time they had to

resort to some rather dramatic negotiating techniques in the boardroom of an Auckland construction company to prise payments for a month’s work out of one major contractor,, they are problems the group knows they have a better than even chance of solving from their own resources.

To some, trusts like the Ponsonby example provide at least part of the answer to unemployment amongst young Maoris. However, although similar groups have grown dramatically in the last few years (there are now about 18 scattered" throughout the country) their scope is likely to remain limited. As the Ponsonby group has found, it tends to remain an “ambulance” solution when they are large and less flexible, providing temporary and not very complicated work for large numbers. To gain skills and some sort of independence they must necessarilj' help fewer people more comprehensively. These smaller groups have to work in much the same business environment as any other small business ventures. Present economic conditions make life hard for any new venture and the small work trusts have no more and no less a chance of survival.