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Pacific Cooperation Foundation: Just as the Asia 2000 Foundation was ...

Tackling Pacific Island problems from within the Parliament: Strategic thinking about ...

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Improving partnership: There is a need to revive the Pacific Islands ...

Tackling blindness among Pacific peoples: Tongan public health specialist ...

HIV AIDS - moral and medical solutions: Public health and other policy planners...

Tongan job solution: Managed employment is a Tongan New Zealander's private ...

The new tertiary landscape - what's in it for Pacific peoples?: Education is ...

Making good citizens: In our Pacific region, and elsewhere in the world ...

Involving Pacific peoples in local decisionmaking: The question all New Zealand ...

Tangata Pasifika? Michael Powles, who has worked ...

Endorsing good governance: Former New Zealand career diplomat Gordon Schroff ...

Need not be conflict: Issues in Pacific governance - where one size does not ...

Cooperation wins: Greater regional cooperation on common issues might ...

APEC and PECC: Though New Zealand seeks to be a good international ...

Advocacy on market access: The Pacific Islands Trade and Investment ...

Being Pa'alagi: The Being Pa'alagi programme, in which I looked back ...

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Talk to all pacific cultures with one voice:
Ethnic Communications

Tongan job solution

‘Managed employment’ is a Tongan New Zealander’s private sector culturally-based solution to a problem concerning Ministers, officials and the community, discussed here by Melino Maka with Anthony Haas.

Melino Maka says some Pacific Island employees are having problems retaining their jobs, and employers are looking for reassurance there are support mechanisms to help employees.

Maka says employers sometimes need help breaking down what they perceive as the mentality of the Pacific people. Sometimes employers like the Pacific person’s skill level, but they can’t get their tongue around their Pacific Island name.

‘ Managed employment’ involves training and placement and support. Providing the support effectively is the biggest problem, says Melino Maka.
The Tongan community leader, who has tested his ideas about managed employment on government MPs and officials, says government support to employers to support employees would be 'win-win'.

Maka has had a series of employment-creation contracts with New Zealand’s Ministry of Social Development, under its work-based training opportunities and its post-placement support. He now hopes to get agreement for adding innovation.

Maka advocates a number of agencies working together to apply the managed employment policy approach.

He envisages the employer supporting the employee to complete training and placement.

Managed employment could involve extending the use of the unemployment benefit.

In addition to roles for the Ministry of Social Development, the managed employment approach would involve the Tertiary Education Commission up-skilling clients. It may require government services to be delivered differently, and from some other agencies as well.

Maka feels the current structures of the New Zealand government do not make it easy to advocate and provide managed employment. In the last three and a half years he found it difficult to push the policy idea to a higher level.
“ We always seem to be working in the framework of the government department – I don’t think that truly reflects partnership,” he says.
Policy innovation should be informed by operational experience, he says.
Greater awareness of Maka’s advocacy of managed employment is, however, leading some relevant decision-makers to look more at the problem – and maybe his solution.

New Zealand’s Associate Minister of Pacific Island Affairs and Mangere MP, Taito Phillip Field says: “I don’t see why we cannot halve Pacific Islands’ unemployment.”

Pacific peoples account for 8% of New Zealand’s unemployed – about 15,000 people living largely in urban areas, he says.
“ I think that, with the right plan of action and strategy, and what’s available with apprenticeships, we should be able to look at sustainable jobs for about half these, says Field.

Shortly after his appointment as Associate Minister he was told that contemporary leaders, such as Melino Maka, are finding frustrations with the structures of government.

“ I accept that criticism,” said Field. “For instance, the apprenticeship schemes and the placing of people in them. I find to my amazement that there are no, or few, Pacific Island employment brokers to do that important work of connecting up these young people with apprenticeship schemes or employment.”

See also ‘Work & Income initiatives’.

Published 3rd qtr, 2003

Luamanuvao Winnie Laban MP champions managed employment

Melino Maka:Managed employment involves training, placement and support

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