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Ashburton jobless numbers rising BY SUE NEWMAN
SUE.N@THEGUARDIAN.CO.NZ
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There are more registered job seekers in the Ashburton District – and fears of less work for some of those in work – but employers are still struggling to find staff, an employment consultant says. The number of registered job seekers in the district rose significantly to hit 347 – 24 per cent more than in the same June quarter in 2014. Sliding dairy prices were being blamed for worsening unemployment as farmers shed staff in regions across the country. However, employment consultant Matt Jones believed that was not the case in Ashburton. “We’re still bringing dairy staff into
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the district but what we are seeing is that farmers might now be looking more at part-time staff, people who can see them through a peak period such as calving,” he said. Of greater concern in the next quarter would be a late start to the killing season at Fairton’s Silver Fern Farms plant, Mr Jones said. With Ashburton losing this year’s calf kill to Pareora, up to eight weeks’ work had been lost at the plant. The flow-on effect was too late to show in the June statistics but staff had noticed an influx of freezing workers at the end of June, at a time when most of the winter seasonal jobs had gone, he said. He was confident that a higher than normal number of freezing work-
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ers registering won’t create a jobless spike as there would be plenty of opportunities in the agricultural sector for casual work into spring. “Some of those are jobs where they won’t need 100 skills.” Concerns were also raised over the impact of a late start to the killing season by another Ashburton consultant, who said some who had worked in the freezing industry for many years would have very job specific skills. The rise in unemployment helped lift the total number of beneficiaries in the district to 1063, the highest for any quarter since September 2013.
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