Guest workers

In 2001 I was 18 and looking for adventure. I wanted to earn enough money (about $14 500, as I recall) to have Centrelink declare me independent from my parents, and pay me while studying. The method I chose to earn this money was fruit picking. I had a license, an old car and barely enough money to drive across the state. There is almost no skill in this industry, and farmers never turn away workers that are willing to turn up. All I had to do was find a fruit picking farm that needed workers. Surely a simple task?

I contacted Centrelink, and asked them which farms had vacancies. They said that they wouldn't tell me, as I wasn't a registered jobseeker on Newstart or Youth Allowance (which of course I couldn't be given I wasn't independent from my parents). They also said it wasn't really their job to directly get people work, only to manage the network of employment agencies. So I rang the relevant agencies, like CSR, and Employment National, etc. They all said that each one of their branches, in each little outback town operated as little semi autonomous entities, that did not share records with one another, nor with their parent office. In short, I would have to call them all, every single office of every single company, throughout the state. After several rejections, I finally got a tentative "yes" from a company in Wondai. After driving down with a high school friend on a 1200 km trip from Townsville, we arrived at the office, only to be told that the position had been filled, but that positions open up all the time, and would I mind waiting around for a day or two? After two weeks in a grubby caravan park, and with our money running perilously low, we decided to try another town. I can't remember how many horrible little places we went to but the answer was always the same; "Just wait around here for a little while and we will probably get you work." Having read Marx's Das Kapital vol 1 that summer, the words "Reserve army of the unemployed" kept flashing up in my mind. It became clear that these job agencies always ask you to stay, no matter how scarce the work is, just so they have a good selection of workers to choose from when they need it. In Bundaberg, we stopped in at a backpacker's hostel. They said they could get us work in exchange for us staying there-paying $100 a week to sleep in a bunk bed. At that time, the average rent my friends in Brisbane were paying (for a house) was $70 a room. By now, my friend and I didn't have $200 between us, so we had to drive home. Once back, we decided to simply call every farm in the phone book within a 200 km radius. In this way, we did eventually find work at a farm near Ayr.

The work was reasonably physical, but not exhausting and I enjoyed it. I talked to my coworkers and none of them had been employed by a job company. Most of them had done the same, incredibly inefficient thing that I had been forced to do, and cold-called every farm they could. Some were living in another horrible backpacker's hostel, paying extortionate rent to live in squalid conditions. After 6 weeks of living this way, a Canadian coworker named Dan decided to move out and get a house somewhere in Ayr. In response to this, the backpacker's hostel forced the farmer to fire him, with the threat of sending no more workers otherwise. This was not a subtle suggestion on the part of the hostel manager, but an explicitly stated policy. The word "Dickensian" comes to mind. Fruit picking seasons inevitably end and I was again forced onto the same treadmill. For that year I was out of work around a third of the time, in a state where fruit was being left to rot on the trees, and by the end of the year I had still not quite earned the required amount. The same stories were repeated in town after shitty little town. The failure of labour supply in this industry is not due to laziness on the part of the unemployed (or at least not entirely) . Rather, a dysfunctional system for finding work imposed by a set of Neo-liberal free-market ideologues acts in concert with grubby collusionist small town cockroach capitalists to deliver the least efficient possible outcome.

This is why I oppose the fruit picking guest worker scheme. Enough willing Australians exist to fill every job available, especially if it becomes a requirement for the long term unemployed in fruit picking areas. The employment system just needs to become more centralized, with the government mandating that all vacancies be advertised on one central website. It is incredibly inefficient to fly pacific islanders back and forth for a few months at time. It would be a terribly carbon intensive exercise for a start, and the resulting additional strain on our overpopulated country can only increase the pressures on water supplies and so forth. The economic cost should also not be underestimated. I am not blind to the developmental benefits such a program could have (in the form of remmitances) on the Pacific nations themselves, but I believe that direct foreign aid on the part of our government is a much more efficient way to deliver improvements in living standards in the third world. The guest worker scheme is a Turnbullite solution, one that posits eternal population growth and environmental vandalism as a remedy to deliberately engineered market failure.