Consenting Adults III

Our section was uneconomic - that was true. It had always been uneconomic. Yet it had its own history. A separate history. Granting planning consent would have absolutely no further implications for the District Plan because our section was unique. It would never be economically viable, and who wanted an uneconomic section? Apart from us ... nobody. (Which was at least morally true.)
Plus, (and here was the clincher) we had established a residential precedent (or was that a presidential recedent?). Previous owners had lived here. There had been a house on the site in the not-too-distant past. The evidence was circumstantial, but overwhelming (at least to us), so we had no real qualms about citing all the hearsay and rumour as confirmed fact. We even went so far as to state categorically that the residence had burnt to the ground in 1969. (Which wasn’t really a lie, because someone had ‘remembered’ that year as the possible year the probable home might have burnt down ... or something similar.)
So, we argued, the best use (in fact, the only use) to be made of the section, given its damnable unviability, would be to allow us to live there. It may not alter its viability, but it’d certainly alter its value ... its rate-able value.
It certainly sounded logical to us.
So we submitted our mini saga, along with a rough drawing of the type of open-plan home we were contemplating, and crossed our fingers. The decision was going to take up to three months - they needed to get an independent report, send copies of our proposal to half the population (including any landowner with property bordering on our section, or even with just a view of our section, our neighbours, the previous owners, seven famous New Zealanders with moustaches, anyone who might one day conceivably pass by our section, as well as setting up an Internet Website), produce a half-hour television documentary about our proposal, wait for submissions (and ratings), bring the issue up at a meeting of the UN Security Council, send a special envoy to China to negotiate the lifting of their veto (in return for dismantling the Human Rights Commission and the repatriation of Taiwan), write their own report, have it vetted by an international panel of economists, have us vetted by Interpol and McDonalds, find their stamp, employ PR consultants and graphic artists to redesign their stamp, resolve a demarcation dispute over who should use the new stamp, apply for a permit reference number, stamp the consent register, register the consent stamping ... then send it to us - so until then, there was nothing for us to do except uncross our fingers and submerge ourselves once again in the stagnant waters of orchard-world.
It wasn’t a thought I particularly treasured, but there were few options. We didn’t need the money, but we didn’t not need it either. Assuming we were given planning consent, there was still the whole building consent process to withstand, which made it unlikely that we’d be able to actually do anything on our property until well after the next apple season. So six months waiting around spending money could just as easily be six months earning money. Not that we were likely to earn much. Orchard work is notoriously poorly paid (in fact, according to my unofficial English-Orchardese dictionary, the correct translation of minimum wage is maximum wage), especially once a number of exacerbating factors are considered, for example the associated long-term health problems (including chronic back problems, Roundupitis, alcoholism and cerebral atrophy), the complete absence of job security (whenever possible, staff are employed under casual contracts which allow instant dismissal, unpaid layoffs at the owner’s whim and no holiday or extra pay ... to name but a few standard clauses), the absence even of wage security (hourly rates having been progressively replaced by contract rates which require a full day’s work under normal conditions to guarantee even minimum wage standards), and the general disregard for employees’ rights (while their wrongs remain punishable by extreme measures).
But poor pay and bad conditions never deterred us. We’d certainly worked in worse jobs (drilling holes in door handles is one occupation which gives new meaning to the term boring), for worse employers (the wife of a certain Bavarian restaurant owner who divided ‘her’ employees into two categories - those who coveted what was down her dirndl, and those whose lives she made a misery ... that is, us - springs immediately to mind), under worse conditions (working the night-shift making rubber chicken-pluckers on the Ramat Hakovesh Kibbutz is definitely no picnic), and for far less money (25 Punt and 7 pints - of milk, that is - per week is low even by Irish standards), yet we’d always managed to somehow come out ahead. Bad conditions were a ‘learning experience’.
No matter how poorly paid the job, we somehow always managed to put aside at least one pay packet per week. That was how we’d saved for our home. That was how we’d financed our travels. We were an efficient team - earning the wages of two people, yet living as just one. So three months of orchard work, followed by another three months picking (this time as seasoned professionals ...) wasn’t to be dismissed lightly, despite my reservations (though you certainly don’t need reservations to work on an orchard ... nor, for that matter, do you need orchards to work on reservations). Besides, if we didn’t work, we’d have nowhere to stay.
As the tedious process of thinning began, staff numbers began to swell more quickly than the fruit, and we realised the two spare bedrooms in ‘our’ house weren’t going to be spare for long. If we didn’t want to spend the next six months listening to AC-DC surrounded by greasy dishes and the smell of freshly burnt meat, with a freezer full of frozen pies, short-and-curlies plugging the shower, stubble spores in the basin and cigarette butts bobbing beneath Toilet Duck waves, we would have to begin to actively recruit.
Unfortunately, suitable applicants were as scarce as seat-belts on Saturday night. We wanted pleasant, clean and considerate people to share our living space with, but orchard workers are only sometimes pleasant, seldom clean, rarely considerate, and often barely even people! Of course there were exceptions, like us. But an orchards’ insatiable appetite for workers willing to endure the stinks and sorrows without making an outrageous fortune, means they’ll literally employ anyone, regardless of personality, hygiene standards, criminal records or work permit deficiencies. Sometimes this translates into a cosmopolitan melange of itinerant eccentrics, students and foreign ‘travellers’.
More often than not, the bulk of the workforce look like escapees from the asylum for social inepts and the terminally maladjusted. (The workforce composition follows a cyclical pattern dictated by the whims of government social policies. Because an inexperienced, married apple-picker is unlikely to earn much more than the dole, it’s scarcely an attractive proposition for the unemployed - especially once stand-downs and relocation costs are calculated.
This understandable reluctance to swap a secure state-funded income for the insecurity of a physically-and-mentally-debilitating temporary job, creates a serious deficiency in the pool of available workers. Rather than enticing legal workers by increased remuneration, orchardists dip further into the reserve of illegal workers. It’s a traditionally tolerated practice, because even illegal workers pay their taxes, and short of trucking in forced work gangs from the cities, there are never enough casual workers in the agriculture sector. Not that the idea of loading the unemployed onto goods wagons and transporting them to forced labour camps is in any way abhorrent to employment service bureaucrats in principle ... it’s the logistics which generally prove unworkable.
Gradually the balance shifts too far - illegal workers are an attractive proposition because they’re often far less trouble and far more amenable, and they don’t cost any more either. So the government responds by stemming the flow of illegal workers by demanding passports to be sent with applications for tax numbers or random inspections, and stimulating the flow of legal workers by reducing benefits, decreasing stand-downs or simply blatant coercion. Of course, there are never enough legal workers, so the rules are soon relaxed and the orchardists again dip further into the pool of illegal workers ....)
In the end we had very little (ie no) input into the make-up of our living arrangements. We returned from work one afternoon to find three strangers installed in what had been our home for the past four months. Of course we had nothing to really complain about. After all, we’d been treated amazingly well from the first day we’d turned up at the cookshop (the orchard bunkhouse) door. First we’d shared Pine Tree Corner with two friends while the cookshop had been literally overflowing with twenty-five souls, then the Clutha Road house by ourselves. But a home is still a home, regardless of the circumstances, and we somehow felt ourselves violated by this sudden intrusion.
Luckily, though, our three new flatmates turned out to be young students from Dunedin, and all roughly fitted our profile. Not that we had much in common, but Saskia, Robert and Nigel were enjoyable, trouble-free company, and the next month passed without incident. (Though in the state of mind I was in, an alien invasion would have barely qualified as an incident. I knew working was the logical thing to do, perhaps the only thing to do, but that didn’t make it any easier. The only thing which inspired me was building our home. Everything else was just filling in time, or worse, wasting time. I wanted to explore our land, to sit on our rocks and dream about our future. I wanted to start planning and digging and hammering and sawing - I didn’t want to pull apple embryos off trees! The shining future still glimmered on the horizon - the achingly close horizon, the unbearably distant horizon - but we were adrift in a dark bureaucrasea, and all we could do was tread water until the tide changed, or the currents dragged us onto its pitiless reefs.) We thinned, we ate, we slept, hot afternoons we sat in the cool Minzion spas or swam in the still blackness of Pinders Pond... and we waited.