Employment Policy
Hiring and retaining good staff is a challenge many of Federated Farmers members face.
Changes to employment legislation over the past few years has added significant compliance costs for employers, particularly small businesses. The result of these legislation changes has been more uncertainty, hassle, paperwork and cost to employers.
Federated Farmers is working towards reducing these costs and makes sure any new legislation takes into account the practicalities of farming businesses.
Immigration
Due to shortages of workers in some areas, many members have looked overseas to fill vacancies.
With the high number of dairy conversions there is a high demand for immigrant dairy workers. There can be a lot of compliance costs associated with employing an immigrant worker. Federated Farmers works with the Immigration Department to improve the industry's access to overseas workers.
One example of the Federation's successful lobbying work is our success in keeping the dairying position 'Assistant Herd Manager' on the Immediate Skills Shortage List. This enables farmers to employ immigrant workers for this position much more easily than otherwise.
If you are planning on hiring an immigrant worker, you can find the information on the Department of Labour website, by clicking here.
Minimum wage review
Many farmers are employers. Raising the minimum wage without improvements in productivity raises on-farm costs and makes farmers less competitive internationally.
Federated Farmers wants the government to focus on policies to improve skills, incentives for work and the business environment. This will enhance competition and productivity and allow businesses to pay the higher wages everyone wants.
The government's social objectives for the minimum wage would be better achieved through other means, such as assistance delivered via the social welfare and tax systems.
Federated Farmers also advocates that board should be included in the minimum wage.
Fact Sheets and Contracts
The Federation has a range of fact sheets to help members with rules around employment. These include:
- Drug and alcohol free workplace
- Increase in annual leave from three to four weeks
- Background checks on prospective employees
- Ending employment checklist
- Pre-employment checklist
- Job descriptions
- Parental leave
- Wages the basics
- Performance management
- Holiday and leave entitlement
- Redundancy
- Abandonment of employment
- KiwiSaver
- Minimum wages
- ACC
- Tax refunds for Employees
