Workforce challenges continue to hinder horticulture sector

At the Hort Connections conference in Adelaide last week, a panel of speakers discussed the navigation of the new workplace in regards to industrial relations and the hiring of workers.

On the panel were Patane Produce director Pennie Patane, Approved Employers Australia executive officer Steve Burdette, Fair Work Ombudsman executive director Steve Ronson, AI Group legal practitioner director Susan Babidge, with Good Fruit & Vegetables journalist Ashley Walmsley moderating the discussion.

After the government released the second consultation of the third tranche of industrial relations and reforms Ms Babidge said there would be changes made that would impact the horticulture sector.

"I would imagine for the horticulture industry, one of the biggest challenges is managing their labour supply," she said.

"The changes that are probably going to impact the horticulture sector the most will be the same sob, same pay proposal put up by the government.

"We haven't seen the precise wording of it but it's largely intended that where contract labour goes into work for a host employer they should be paid the same as a directly engaged employee."

Ms Babidge said people may need clarification on the same job, same pay proposal.

"It's really around what is the same job - is it the same classification in the enterprise agreement or award? Is it the same qualification? Is it the same location?" she said.

"Is it the highest paid person doing the same job, knowing that some people are paid more than the minimum or is it just the base rate of pay?

"Is it ship loadings and overtime rates which might be different under an enterprise agreement of the host employer?

"There are issues around the viability of contract labour in these businesses, if they have to pay more in labour are they going to pass it on to the host employers and if that's the case is it going to create issues for business to business contractional relationships?"

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The Pacific Australia Labour Mobility Scheme was a popular discussion point, with Mr Burdette saying the scheme could have consequences on the horticulture industry.

"We're going to have to go back to the drawing board if they don't change any of these issues and really re-think how we're going to employ people and how many we're going to employ," he said.

"We see a big conflict between how many people the Pacific want to send us versus what we can actually afford to have.

"What they're asking us is to pay people for 30 hours a week, which in the horticulture industry is very tough."

Mr Burdette said paying workers was not the issue, with one of the issues being that the administrative burden was too high, getting too costly and too complicated.

"We want to go with a collaborative approach to work on some sensible solutions to the issues," he said.

"We're urging the Government to come back to us and talk through some of these issues."

Mr Ronson said the PALM program was probably the best regulated employment program in Australia.

"There's less dodgy labor hire entities and less dodgy employers in the PALM program, compared with the rest of the horticulture sector," he said.

"We're looking at a very tightly-regulated cohort.

"In terms of our investigations that we've conducted in this last financial year, out of the 50 improved employers that we've looked at, the compliance rates are trending up and about four out of five are compliant."

Despite this high compliance rate, Mr Ronson said there was always room for improvement.

"We're looking at about 20 per cent non-compliance and if we drill into that 20pc, I'd say 5pc is serious and the rest is remedial and relates to improvements that could be made," he said.

WHILE Qld and WA horticulture sectors had improved their compliance rates, Mr Ronson said there were still regions that had not been complying.

"In terms of the Riverland, Mildura and Adelaide Hills, there's still high non-compliance," he said.

Ms Patane said coming from WA there was some added complexity to find labour as they are a mining state, while due to the vegetables they're growing, they're an all year round business.

"When the horticultural award changed a couple years ago and they brought in the additional loading for overtime, a lot of the backpackers we had at that time we actually converted to full time," she said.

"We look at a 55 hour week and that very rarely changes, so that wasn't really feasible to have a casual arrangement.

"There's a place for the PALM scheme and going forward we all know that you're going to be looking for multiple areas of employment."

Ms Patane said she had seen a slight lift in the number of holiday workers, but quite a different attitude.

"We're not returning to where we were pre-COVID and they're definitely only looking for short-term employment, they're just wanting to do their 88 days," she said.

"That's not really going to help us where we are.

"Obviously in our kind of business the quality insurance system and all of the regulatory systems that we're working under mean that we would prefer to have people long-term, so that's where we're looking to go."

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