The editorial this morning goes out to all the small and medium business people. Those of you who are starting the work week looking to earn your own keep, employ some New Zealanders, pay your taxes, and provide a product or service that people want or need. You don't want luxury yachts and private jets. You just want to work hard, be rewarded fairly, have people get out of your way, not be strangled by red tape. Seems a fairly reasonable state of being.
But as we know, small and medium enterprises are struggling and have been struggling for a few years now. And with an election looming, the EMA has released its election policy directives for 2026 And there are five of them: stability and certainty, wouldn't that be lovely, infrastructure and consenting, energy supply, employment legislation, and investment and innovation.
Amongst its directives, the EMA highlighted what it says is a big issue for businesses: the lack of work readiness among those graduating from educational institutions. The number of those not in employment, education, or training in the 18 to 24 age bracket continues to rise. They've come out of school, they've come out of training, and nobody will take them on, nobody's willing to take a risk. There's no doubt one of the drivers behind these numbers is a reluctance by employers to hire those new faces, says the EMA.
They're simply not ready for the workforce, lacking many basic skills and struggling with the simple disciplines of turning up, listening, and engaging in the workplace. So the finger's being pointed squarely at the young people and the schools and educational institutions that have trained them.
On early edition this morning, employment lawyer Max Whitehead disagreed. He said it's not the young people, it's the businesses lacking confidence to hire right now. Young people have always been young people. We've always been a bit useless when we start in our job unless you're a rare and wonderful unicorn, you don't know the job. You might have been trained, that's not the same thing as doing and being in the job, you don't really earn your keep until a little later. So it's no use pointing the finger at the young person.
Max Whitehead said it's the environment and the conditions at the moment that mean employers aren't willing to take a chance. And he also says that the corresponding lack of productivity is due to us being a nation of one or two men bands who lack the technological capability to be more productive.
New Zealand's now a nation of contractors. They're just like one or one man bands or just a couple of people of employees. And they are the people that are really the core of our country. And that's where I think EMA's missing out is focusing on that, getting them on their feet again. Maybe even if some of many of our contractors worked as cooperatives and actually purchased collectively some equipment that would make them actually more productive. That would be better ideas, but that needs to be incentivised.
Where do you think the issue is? If you are a one or two man band, you might have a few little young people working for you. You might have some people who've been with you for 50 or 60 years, but three, four, up to 10 employees.
There's been an ongoing issue with New Zealand's lack of productivity. It's not that we don't know how to work hard. People are working hard, but they're not being as productive as they could be. Max Whitehead says we lack the technological capability that a group of like minded SMEs could get together and buy the technology, the computer programs that might be expensive, the capital that might be expensive, that you couldn't do on your own but you might be able to do as a team. I just don't think it's the young people.
Everywhere I look, there are young people keeping shops, stores, businesses going over the long weekend. Without them, we'd be stuffed. And I bet there'd be a hell of a lot more young people in work if they could get it.
You certainly hear of young people going around and knocking on doors and wanting to work. if you're a small, medium business operator, owner operator, are you exactly where you want to be? If you're not, what is it going to take for you to be where you want to be, to be as productive and earning as much as you want to be?
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