Seventeen years of looking the other way
New Zealand’s Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme launched in 2007 with 5,000 places and a simple promise: reliable labour for growers, reliable income for Pacific workers. The cap has since grown to 20,750 for 2024/25, and the sector it serves has boomed. Horticulture and viticulture export earnings grew from $2.5 billion to close to $7 billion by 2022/23. RSE workers now make up roughly 12% of the peak workforce across the value chain.
The scheme is, by most measures, a success story. The problem is what that success was built on.
The Human Rights Commission review by Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner Saunoamaali’i Dr Karanina Sumeo found workers subjected to unexplained pay deductions, poor healthcare access, grossly inadequate housing, and denial of personal and cultural freedoms. She said some conditions “shocked” her, with extreme cases akin to modern day slavery. In the South Island, Vanuatu workers described sharing accommodation with six to ten people, paying $110 to $150 per week, with one heater in conditions reaching minus five degrees.
The September 2023 MBIE Cabinet paper was blunt: poor worker wellbeing “risks severely damaging the scheme’s social licence to operate and compromising long-term sustainability”.
Contracts that would never survive an ERA hearing
Immigration lawyer Richard Small from Pacific Legal identified a structural failure that goes beyond bad apples. Employment agreements were found to forbid any criticism of employers online, a condition flatly illegal under New Zealand employment law. Small told RNZ: “No New Zealand worker would have a condition in their contract that forbids criticism of their employer”, adding that Immigration NZ had been sent copies and was well aware.
First Union’s Anita Rosentreter described the bonded labour dynamic plainly: “There’s a real issue with the employment essentially being bonded… if there’s an issue in their employment and they are let go for some reason, then they risk being sent back home”. Some workers received less than half of agreed wages in early pay cycles after employer deductions for migration costs.
This is not a free market. It is a captive one. Workers tied to a single employer by visa conditions, unable to complain publicly by contract, and facing deportation if they push back, have no meaningful bargaining power. The low cost of RSE labour was partly achieved by workers absorbing costs that should have sat elsewhere.
Reform arrived, but not the kind workers needed
The HRC review made 13 recommendations including untying visas from single employers and enforcing accommodation standards. Cabinet noted the MBIE review proposals in October 2023 but made no decisions, deferring to the incoming minister.
The changes that actually landed went the other direction. The Development Policy Centre’s analysis found three changes that directly reduced workers’ take-home pay: removing the 10% wage loading for new workers, scrapping the guaranteed 30-hour weekly payment, and lifting a six-year accommodation charge freeze. Their verdict was direct: employers won, Pacific workers lost.
The Government also quietly scrapped proposed Pacific Programmes for meat and seafood processing, replacing them with new visa types costing NZ$1,540 in fees plus $920 for insurance compared to roughly $350 for a standard RSE visa. Migrant worker facilitator Beryl Razak said bluntly: “the workers are already in debt before they even start working”.
Small growers will feel it most
Horticulture NZ CEO Kate Scott has argued the accommodation cost increase “directly undermines its own ambition to double export values by 2034”. She is not wrong that compliance costs are real. But the structural data tells a harder story: 62% of 179 active RSE employers in 2024 recruited fewer than 50 workers, with half recruiting fewer than 20. Any tightening of standards will hit these smaller operators hardest, accelerating consolidation toward larger corporate growers who can absorb the overhead.
Average worker tenures are also shorter than the scheme’s development rationale assumes. Vanuatu workers average three seasons, Samoa 2.9, Tonga 2.8. The remittance benefits that justify the programme politically are thinner than the headline numbers suggest.
The bill is coming either way
The centre-right instinct here should be clear. A guest-worker scheme that tolerates illegal employment conditions and visa-tied workers who cannot complain is not free enterprise. It is a subsidised labour supply built on suppressed worker rights. Growers who have relied on that subsidy for 17 years will not enjoy the adjustment, but the alternative is worse. If the scheme loses its social licence, or if the AEWV-style exploitation documented by the Human Rights Commission spreads to RSE, ministers will not be choosing between tighter rules and the status quo. They will be choosing between reform and abolition.
Sources
- Immigration NZ: Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme research
- RNZ: RSE worker treatment like ‘slavery’, says Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner (2022-12-12)
- RNZ: Major culture shift needed in treatment of RSE workers, immigration lawyer says (2022-12-13)
- NZ Herald: Calls for ‘complete overhaul’ of RSE scheme but business group hits back at criticism
- Devpolicy Blog: RSE changes – employers win, Pacific workers lose (2024-09-26)
- Horticulture NZ: Government decision on RSE accommodation charges disappointing
- RNZ: Documents reveal NZ quietly axed Pacific migrant worker programme in favour of high-cost seasonal visas
- Human Rights Commission: The AEWV Scheme – A Human Rights Review (2024-08)