El área de estudio de PISA 2012

The research population consisted of growers, contractors, workers, government officials, those involved in pastoral care, and those with institutional memory such as retired officials. These were loosely grouped into respondents and informants, the key difference being that respondents (normally RSE employers and RSE workers) were asked a pre-determined set of interview questions common to a group with some level of subject/object distinction preserved, whereas informants were each interviewed according to their particular expertise. The first round of primary research began in late November 2011 and finished in July 2012 and included interviews with officials, a survey of all publicly listed employers, interviews with a strata of employers, visits to their

enterprises and sites of accommodation, and discussions with some workers. Additionally, a small number of kiwifruit enterprises in the Bay of Plenty were visited in November 2012 en route from Vanuatu. The original research plan was modified as I decided not to carry out semi-structured

65_{O’Leary (2010, p. 128) further suggests that mixed methodologies fall into three types; “quantitative}

perspective with acceptance of qualitative data”, “qualitative perspective with acceptance of quantitative data”, and question-driven perspectives. My research is based on the latter proposition: context and questions have determined the methods required in each phase of the research.

worker interviews in New Zealand although numerous “small” conversations took place and field notes were made. The role of employers as gate-keepers posed a difficulty when it came to choosing the workers I wished to interview, not due to any deliberate effort on the part of employers to withhold information. This had implications for the role of the worker interviews in Port Vila (see 4.32), which became the principal source for workers’ perspectives on their New Zealand

experiences as well as their experiences at home.

Interviews with informants were investigative in nature and sought to reconstruct the history of the development of the RSE and the roles of the various stakeholders. Another aim was to triangulate the information received from employers with that from government and other sources. A third was to gain an accurate understanding of the perceived legal and ethical framework within which the RSE operated. Particular attention was given to interviewing Hawkes Bay based officials, given that many of the respondents were also based in Hawkes Bay. Most key informants were either government officials or support workers.

Government officials hold institutional knowledge essential to an understanding of how the RSE works. Interviews were conducted with officials from the then Departments of Immigration and Labour (now within the Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment), Work and Income New Zealand, and brief enquiries were made within Inland Revenue. The Official Information Act was used sparingly to obtain official documents used in the formulation of the policy in 2006. Attention was also given to media coverage at this time and subsequently. Interviews were conducted with officials from NZCTU, and with a limited number of pastoral care workers. All the interviews referred to were sound recorded, with the exception of conversations with some pastoral care workers.

Survey of employers

The employer survey was piloted in November 2012 and posted to employers in January 2013. The purpose of the survey was jointly to obtain basic information on the involvement of growers in the scheme and to establish sufficient contact with a range of growers to choose respondents for more detailed interviews. The survey is appended as Appendix 1 and the results are summarised in Appendix 2. Some of these findings were used to supplement interview data, while a selection of findings were used to select employers to approach for interviews.

The survey was posted on January 9th _{2012 with an equivalent on line response option, which few}

employers preferred. Reminders were sent in late February and May. According to Immigration sources, there were 130 RSE employers in 2011. Surveys were posted to 112 who were publicly listed. Of these, 5 were returned undelivered and enquiries indicated that with one exception these

were “sleepers”.66 _{A further 3 were notified as having gone into liquidation leaving a denominator of}

104, from which were obtained 76 completed surveys; a response rate of 73%.

A purposive sampling approach was taken to the selection of employers to be interviewed. When the survey response rate reached 65% an initial survey analysis was taken and quotas, meaning the number of employers to be interviewed according to several criteria, established for interviews. Initially 18 employers were selected and approached for interviews/visits and 16 accepted. As the interviews proceeded the interview list was continuously refined and re-appraised until 22

employers were selected, with the quotas as close as possible to those in the survey responses. Care was taken not to apply the quotas in a mechanistic way, so although the choice of respondents was quota based, the saturation67 _{principle was also used.}

Six factors were initially considered for non-probabilistic stratification including the type of enterprise, the size of employer, the source country and gender of employee, employer

attitudes/beliefs as indicated from the survey, and geographical location. After an initial analysis of the survey results at the 65% return level, three factors were chosen for quota: type of enterprise, employer attitudes, and size of employer. It was now clear that by including pack houses as a category of enterprise, employers of women would feature proportionately in the sample (the issue of work allocation by gender is discussed in Chapter 6). Geographic location was delimited because resources were not available for a Wellington based researcher to spend equal amounts of time in regions such as Otago and the Bay of Plenty. Vanuatu was confirmed at this time for field work, and I wanted a predominance of employers of at least some ni-Vanuatu, but not exclusively as there would be insights from talking to employers of, for example, Samoans and Tongans as well.

The following information explains the process by which the grower respondents were selected for site visits, and indicates how well the quotas were met. It also gives a reasonable summary of the types of growers in New Zealand, employing over 5,000 of the RSE workers.

66 _{Not all RSE registered employers activated the ATR process.}

67 _{In a study of interviewee selections for qualitative data using the saturation principle, Mason (2010) found} that 30 was still typically the number of interviews. The number 30 has significance in inferential approaches, but there is a possibility that qualitative processes have been unduly influenced.

(i) Employer Size

After several iterations I grouped the employers’ businesses into four sizes, labelled from smallest to largest as a, b, c, and d, described as follows:

x A Unlikely to be a listed company or to have a website. Usually a single family business where a family member may be involved in other employment to help with the liquidity. They may employ up to approximately 30 RSE workers.

x B Often a business set up as a limited liability company. Typically employing in excess of 30 RSE workers. May have some professional employment (human resources) roles. x C Usually working from more than one ATR (agreement to recruit) and typically sourcing their RSE workers from more than one country. There will likely be over 100 RSE employees. They will often be a labour contractor rather than a grower. There may be signs of vertical integration in the business.

x D Only three enterprises of this scale in New Zealand, employing hundreds of RSE employees and will have many ATRs and will be widely known.

The number of RSE employees was the primary factor in the sizing exercise. However, two questions from the survey were used in combination: the number of employees in 2010/2011 and the

proportion of the harvest (or equivalent) being carried out by the RSE workers. As the second question had been asked in terms of grouped data (for example those who stated that between half and three quarters of their crops were RSE harvested) the reciprocals of the midpoints were used to adjust the numbers of employees. This provided an initial size list from which minor modifications were made based on added information on the number of hectares planted. Table 4.1 shows the numbers of employers actually interviewed after 22 site visits compared with the numbers calculated as a percentage of the total surveyed at the end of March. To track one row as an example, 30% of employers were of size A, so the aim was to interview 7 of this size. At the end of the process 6 were interviewed.

Table 4-1: Enterprises Visited by Size

Size N=76 % Desired no’s

to visit at n=22 After 15 visits (end of May) After 22 visits (end of November) A 23 30 7 5 6 B 34 45 9 6 9 C 16 21 5 3 5 D 3 4 1 1 2

(ii) Employer Attitudes/Beliefs

An initial assessment of employer attitudes was based on a survey question which asked employers to nominate three attributes (out of ten) which they most looked for when choosing Pacific workers. Almost all employers included reliability as one of three, but an employer who ticked, for example, reliability, sobriety, and obedience was put in a different category from one who ticked

independence, adaptability and existing skills. Employers were grouped in four categories:

x The α group were employers who had emphasised such matters as existing skill sets and independent work habits.

x Those with a β label had emphasised such attributes as stamina and obedience. x Those with a γlabel had usually placed emphasis on sobriety as well as reliability. x The δ group, numerically the largest, had simply not over-emphasised such matters as

sobriety.

This labelling system was not expected to be either robust or permanent. Its purpose was simply to increase the likelihood of interviewing employers with a diverse mindset and guard against the possibility of a series of repeat interviews with like minded employers which could have been highly misleading. The process also provided rich information for further investigation.

Table 4-2: Enterprises visited by Employer Beliefs/Attitudes

* The reason for the discrepancy in N is that not all respondents filled out the section on employee attributes. Those responses noted as not applicable did fill this section out but in an unsatisfactory manner. The

enterprise type was recalculated more than once, hence the higher N from a later calculation.

Attitude N=65* % n=22 (desired) After 15 visits After 22 visits (end of November) α 6 9 2 2 3 β 11 17 4 3 5 γ 9 14 3 3 3 δ 36 55 12 6 9 NA 3 4 1 1 2

(iii) Type of Enterprise

After several iterations, the categories used were Asparagus grower, Contractor, Horticulturalist, Kiwifruit grower, Orchardist, Pack house, Packhouse/grower, Pip fruit grower, Viticulturalist, and Miscellaneous. Initially, kiwifruit growers were excluded from the intended mix of interviews in recognition of the high cost of including the Bay of Plenty in the study. However a late decision was made to visit the Bay of Plenty on return from Vanuatu in light of the high proportion of kiwifruit workers from Tanna Island.

Table 4-3: Enterprises visited by Type

Although

Although the tables show that the strata of enterprises visited was in close proportion to the total, the principle of saturation was at work as well as the principle of proportionality. In other words although a serious attempt was made to visit 4-5 pip-fruit growers among the 22 enterprises visited because pip-fruit growers make up about 20% of the RSE employers, each visit was intended to elicit new information rather than visit an enterprise with almost identical characteristics to the last one. I had some doubts about how the principle of saturation would work in practice but found that there

Enterprise Type N=76 % n=22 desired no’s After 15 visits (end of May) After 22 visits (end of November) Asparagus 3 4 1 1 1 Labour Contractor 14 19 4 4 5 Horticulturalist 7 9 2 0 0 Kiwifruit 7 9 2 - 3 Orchardist 12 16 4 3 5

Pack house only 7 9 2 1 2

Packhouse/grower 3 4 1 1 1

Pip fruit 15 20 4 5 5

Misc 5 6 1 0 0

Viticulturalist 3 4 1 - -

came a point after a certain number of employers had been interviewed when the answers to questions could be accurately guessed in advance.

Interviews in the lower North Island and upper South Island ran from mid-March until June. By the last week in May, 15 employers had been visited, mainly in Hawkes Bay. Two thirds of these

interviews were sound recorded and one third were noted during or immediately after the interview with follow up checking.68 _{A small follow up was undertaken in November 2012 in the Bay of Plenty.}

The core questions for semi-structured interviews were designed using an algorithm developed by Wengraff (2001, pp. 156-162) whereby theory questions (TQ’s), arising directly from the stated objectives of the research phrased in the language of the research were first developed, and from which a small number of interview questions (IQs), that is questions in a language and context appropriate for the respondents, were developed for each TQ. From the logical listing of interview questions, detailed in Appendix 3, 15 interview questions were developed and a maximum of twelve chosen for any one interview. These were subject to further modification when the survey results were analysed.