As the human capital of the world, India can provide the solution
Venkat Raman
Auckland, January 4, 2023
Tourist operators and stakeholders in the hospitality sector will be happy to learn from Tourism Minister Stuart Nash that more than 530,000 international tourists will visit New Zealand during the ongoing Summer season but their enthusiasm is dampened by a severe skills shortage.
Hotels, resorts and other accommodation providers, restaurants, bars and food outlets report that they are unable to meet the peak demand for services because of the dearth of personnel.
Many in the hospitality sector have told Indian Newslink that rather than recruiting people with experience in the field, they just ‘need extra hands’ to meet their reviving business.
Hopes of revival hit
“We can train anyone willing to work. Thousands of tourists and visitors are arriving after the borders have reopened. We have incurred huge losses and some of us were on the verge of closing down due to the rigid restrictions imposed by the government with lockdowns and limitations on gatherings. There are signs of resumption and we do not want to lose the opportunity,” they said.
One entrepreneur, well known to us, has shut down two restaurants because of staff shortage.
“Along with my wife and children, I am serving customers at our restaurants in the Auckland CBD. We also wash dishes and do general cleaning. We are happy to above the average wage but cannot get people to work,” he said.
Another restaurant owner, who has to cope with the ‘swinging moods’ of staff, said that tolerance is the byword in the industry these days.
“There is high mobility in the industry. There are no restrictions for people with work permits to switch jobs and employers are waiting to poach,” another restauranteur who runs a dine-in and takeaway service in the South Auckland suburb of Papatoetoe said.
Mr Nash said that more than 20,000 people on Working Holiday Visas in New Zealand since July 2022 and that they are working hard to fill the gaps.
A gripping endemic
Employers and Manufacturers Association Chief Executive Brett O’Riley said that staff shortage is becoming endemic in New Zealand and that it is gripping every industry.
He said that low unemployment, the ageing workforce and the paucity of migrant workers are among the contributing factors.
“Shortage of Project Managers, Engineers Quantity Surveyors and others is affecting the construction sector. There is a high demand for technicians in the manufacturing sector, auditors in the accounting sector and doctors and nurses in the public health system. The government should immediately increase the labour force and grant amnesty to overstayers,” he said.
According to Mr O’Reily, there are about 16,000 overstayers in New Zealand.
“They cannot work legally and hence an inactive workforce. We should also have a more flexible approach toward the labour force from Pacific countries. The government should also think of long-term policies to solve the immigration issue,” he said.
Tapping the Indian Resource
The government should seriously consider tapping the enormous potential that India offers with its qualified, young workforce. Millions of highly qualified young professionals from India are employed in all the developing countries of the world, contributing to their progress and prosperity.
According to the Migrant Policy Institute based in Washington DC, about 20 million Indians are employed as migrant workers across the world, of which about nine million are employed as low-income, unskilled workers in the Arab Gulf.
“Over time, the Indian government has built multiple systems for engaging with its emigrant population and the many descendants who call India their ancestral home. Money sent as remittances represents a prime tactic for improving financial conditions and diversifying risk, particularly in rural households. The estimated US $87 billion in official remittances received in India in 2021 represented the world’s largest such flow and amounted to nearly 15% of all global transfers to low and middle-income countries, according to the World Bank.”
According to the Institute, two years after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, would-be migrants and travellers began eying a return to normalcy in 2022.
Stubborn backlogs
Yet stubborn backlogs in adjudicating immigration and travel applications hampered the movement of all types. In some cases, these challenges were symptoms of the pandemic, which prompted unprecedented closures of consulates, and government offices, and a worldwide near-total halt on mobility in 2020. But many administrative pileups have been building for years and came to a head in 2022 as countries seemed eager to put the pandemic in the rearview mirror.
“For instance, stubborn case backlogs in Australia meant that 962,000 would-be migrants were stuck in limbo as of May, including nearly 150,000 highly skilled workers. However, the queue shrank in the latter months of the year as the government ramped up its efforts to make the system more efficient. Similar problems plagued the United States. Although most US consulates had fully reopened for visa processing by late 2022, government officials remained buried under the piles of work that had accumulated in 2020 and 2021. At the end of October, nearly 385,000 applicants for permanent residence were waiting for an interview at a US consulate; in highly congested consulates, particularly in India, people seeking a tourist visa could expect to wait nearly 1000 days. Meanwhile, 8.8 million applications were awaiting processing as of June, a 54% growth over late 2019, pre-Covid-19,” it said.
In all, the situation underscored an incongruity between ambitions and capabilities. Backlogs have made it harder for immigration systems to address labour market and demographic needs as countries seek to move on from the pandemic.
