The Government has set out the biggest rewrite of the Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme since it started nearly 20 years ago, promising simpler rules for growers with clean records while leaving the most contested question of all, what workers can be charged to live in employer accommodation, unresolved until September.
Immigration Minister Erica Stanford announced the package on Tuesday 28 July. The scheme brings about 17,000 workers from the Pacific into New Zealand each year to pick, prune and pack for 207 recognised employers, and it has grown up alongside an industry that now earns close to $9 billion a year from horticulture and viticulture exports, up from $2.5 billion when the scheme began in 2007.
Stanford said the scheme “has been a standout success for nearly 20 years, helping meet seasonal labour needs in our horticulture and viticulture industries while providing opportunities for work and training for Pacific workers and supporting their communities”. Her argument for change is not that it has failed but that it has silted up. The rules, she said, have become more complicated and in some areas unnecessarily burdensome.
The headline change is a graduated accreditation system. Instead of every employer facing the same paperwork on the same cycle, growers with a strong compliance record move up a ladder, and the employers the Government rates as exemplary will hold their accreditation for six years rather than being reassessed on a short cycle. That is a significant saving in compliance time for large established orchards, and a significant bet that past behaviour predicts future behaviour.
Workers get more room to move as well. RSE visas have historically tied a worker tightly to the employer who recruited them, which is the structural reason the scheme keeps producing complaints. Under the changes, workers will find it easier to shift between RSE employers, with what the Government calls additional safeguards attached. Workers who walk away from a contract because of mistreatment will also be able to reach the migrant exploitation protection visa, which allows a stay of up to six months while they find other work or arrange to go home.
There is also a plain piece of housekeeping that matters more than it sounds. Internet access is being added to the prescribed accommodation standards, so that workers living in employer-provided housing for a season of five or six months can actually talk to their families. And the rules on what an employer may recover from a worker for transport, insurance and accommodation are being written down clearly, with standardised cost recovery agreements, so that both sides know in advance what can and cannot come out of a pay packet.
The changes roll out in stages from early 2027 through to 2029, which means none of this touches the coming season. The one decision arriving sooner is accommodation. The Government has consulted on weekly rent caps in the range of $150 to $211 a person, with employers able to recover only their actual costs, and Stanford has said decisions are expected by the end of September.
That timing is not an accident. The accommodation question was forced into the open by the Employment Court case Soapi v Pick Hawke’s Bay, which found workers had been charged around 15 percent of their wages for accommodation when something closer to 5 percent could be justified, and which turned up deductions for items including protective equipment and missing cutlery that had never been approved by Immigration New Zealand. RNZ has reported that Horticulture New Zealand had warned the Minister about the potential consequences of an adverse finding in that case. Whatever the caps land on in September will effectively decide how much of that judgment gets written into the scheme’s own rules.
The industry response has been warm. Horticulture New Zealand chief executive Kate Scott told RNZ the review was “timely for a scheme that has delivered enduring benefits for growers, workers and Pacific communities for almost two decades”.
Yummy Fruit general manager Paul Paynter put the case for easing off established employers more bluntly, telling RNZ the trouble in the scheme had been “90-plus percent with labour contractors rather than with established businesses like ours”. That is the fault line the graduated accreditation model is built on. If Paynter is right, concentrating scrutiny where the complaints actually come from is efficient regulation. If he is wrong, or if the labelling of who counts as exemplary is generous, then a six-year accreditation is six years of light-touch oversight for whoever slips through.
It is also worth reading the package alongside what has already changed. Stanford earlier removed the requirement that new RSE workers be paid at least 10 percent above the minimum wage, a change phased so that it applied first to workers with less than two years of experience in the scheme. Taken together, the direction of travel is towards a scheme that costs employers less to run and asks workers to rely more on written standards and complaints processes than on pay floors built into the visa.
With the general election coming, seasonal labour is one of the few immigration settings where the major parties broadly agree the scheme should continue and disagree mainly about the terms. If you want to work out where the parties sit before you vote, our voting tool compares their positions.
What happens in September will tell you more than anything announced this week. Simpler paperwork is easy to agree on. A number on a rent cap is where the argument actually is.
What do you think, should growers with long clean records get six years between checks, or does that leave workers too exposed? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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