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Builders struggle to fill vacancies BY SUE NEWMAN
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Auckland building companies might be struggling to find qualified staff but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to find the staff you need in the provinces, an Ashburton builder says. Long-time construction company owner Des Millar said it was difficult to retain good qualified staff and while he takes on an apprentice a year to keep staff numbers up, it wasn’t always easy to have the numbers of experienced people on staff you’d like to have, he said. There are claims within the industry that competition from the red hot Auckland home build market was draining staff from the provinces and pushing wages sky high, but Millar isn’t blaming Auckland for southern staff shortages.
“I’m not sure competition out of town has much bearing here. Most of the tradies around Ashburton are born and bred here or have made a conscious decision to come and live here.” Most of Ashburton’s shortages were simply driven by too much work, or by peaks and troughs within the industry that made it difficult to get the balance of staff numbers right, Millar said. “There’s plenty of work around at the moment, but it’s not as constant as it was in the past. We’re coming out of a trough and right now we’re pretty busy,” Millar said. John McIntosh backed that up. Rather than racing up, he believes if there’s been any change, wages have dipped in recent months as the industry has been through a few quieter months. “Things are picking up now though,
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particularly in the residential area,” he said. Like Millar, McIntosh regularly takes on apprentices and that keeps his job ranks filled, but in common with other building companies, he said he’s always on the look-out for highly skilled staff. “There’s usually a job for the right person, but we’ve been lucky, a lot of our guys come through their apprenticeships and stay on or go overseas and then come back to the firm.” Residential work was picking up again, but things were still quiet on the commercial side with Ashburton part of a Canterbury wide slow down, McIntosh said. Competition in the Auckland market might have pushed builders’ wages up to $99,000 a year, but that certainly wasn’t reflected in the provinces, he said.
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