There is a shortage of employees in some industries in New Zealand. The Prime Minister, Bill English stated the other day that he has been told repeatedly that one reason employers are short staffed is due to applicants failing drug tests. The Chattering Classes, the media and left-wing political opponents, all still living in the musty back rooms of Sydney and Beatrice Webb, went all apoplectic.
Where's your evidence? What surveys was this based upon? Ignorant prejudice, you stupid man, etc. The PM was quietly firm: "that's what employers have been telling me". Once consequence is that employers are ending up giving jobs to immigrants, who, for some inexplicable reason, don't spend their lives smoking weed and P. They actually want to work.
One media outlet broke away from the pack. Stuff reported:
A Hamilton-based farm recruitment agency is backing Prime Minister Bill English's claims that Kiwi workers' inability to pass drug tests are why overseas workers are needed.The collage of mockers once again immediately went into a full throated denial.
Cross Country Recruitment managing director Ben De'Ath said that since December 4, 2016, 21 individual farm owners have contacted him seeking new staff because they have had to instantly dismiss staff due to failed drug tests for methamphetamine or cannabis. Three-quarters of these farm owners were in Waikato and the rest were in the Central Plateau. These farmers were now short staffed purely because of illegal drugs, he said.
De'Ath said his company started to record why vacancies were arising in December because it helped make a case to Immigration New Zealand for foreign workers on behalf of farm owners. In one extreme case, a staff member threatened to kill his employer after he was dismissed following a positive test. "They had to involve the police to get the man off-site and there was a 24-hour period where the farmer was scared to leave his house," he said.
In another case, thousands of dollars of farm equipment went missing after the employee was dismissed. The police recovered some of the stolen equipment and the farm owner was left was a huge clean up bill to decontaminate the house of methamphetamine. He estimated anecdotally that last year, there were at least three to four vacancies arising monthly in the farming industry because of drug use. "I think what the Prime Minister has said is very factual."
The comment was slammed by opposition parties, unions and the New Zealand Drug Foundation.Well, at least one has to acknowledge these chaps are consistent. Nevertheless the problem remains:
De'Ath stressed that the vast majority of dairy farm vacancies were due to the industry's expansion and the remoteness of these farms made it a challenge for the industry to find staff. But drugs were still a big issue for a minority of people in the industry. He feared those farmers affected would be ignored because of people claiming the problem was not as bad as English had said.The flat earthers are in full denial mode. These things do not exist. They do not happen. The imperatives of class consciousness absolutely require us to deny! Deny! Deny!
Waikato Federated Farmers president Chris Lewis said the region's farmers have had issues with drug use in the workplace. It was an issue that often went unseen on farms and the organisation ran meetings last year on how to recognise drugs in the workplace, which were attended by 20-30 people. "The farmers there all had stories to tell," he said
This reaction amounts to a faithful replica of the behaviour of Sydney and Beatrice when they went to the USSR in the early nineteen thirties to see for themselves what a wondrous world Stalin was building. They published an extensive book on how glorious the (officially non-existent) gulags were. Privately they were aghast. But, better to put on a brave face and "see no evil, hear no evil".
Their intellectual and spiritual descendants are alive and well in New Zealand.
No comments:
Post a Comment