Staff shortages costing up $20 million a year in lost production at Qld abattoir

Big Meats owner/manager Peter Gibbs said he was currently short on staff, but it did not help the situation that the staff they did employ cannot get suitable housing.

Mr Gibbs said he made an approach to Wide Bay Health to use the old nursing quarters at the Biggenden hospital, but was told they would have to remove the building off the hospital grounds if they wanted to use it.

"We're using the PALM scheme to bring in labour and with that we can bring people in for three years and then they have to return home," he said.

"We definitely would prefer to employ locals, but we just can't source enough local people to work in the industry."

Mr Gibbs said his workforce varied seasonally between 80 and 100, but to work efficiently they needed to sit around 100 to 120.

He said staff shortages were costing the business around $10 million to $20 million a year in throughput.

Currently, Big Meats' workforce includes 35 Pacific Islanders mostly Fijians and 25 locals, with the rest sourced from Gayndah, Childers, Bundaberg and Maryborough.

"So we look at bringing in about dozen Islanders every year. We are into the first year where our first lot of blokes go back so they're returning home from now through to September," he said.

"So we will lose eight to 10 of those workers and we will need to replace them which we have - (they're) in the system coming over."

Aside from labour shortages, Mr Gibbs said finding housing for his workers when they arrived was a big problem because there was little government housing in Biggenden.

"There's a definite housing shortage in regional Queensland," he said.

"And, people on the wait list for government housing tend not to want to work anyway and they're coming in from other areas so (that) housing is being taken up by those people...coming into the town.

"Not that there's a great deal of housing available, but any rental housing, we're pretty well taking whatever we can get as it comes on the market - but, in a town the size of Biggenden, there's only 900 people in Biggenden, that's a limited supply."

Mr Gibbs was hopeful a deal could have been negotiated for the use of the former nursing quarters that housed 12 people and had a communal kitchen and bathrooms, but that was ruled out because of its location on hospital grounds near the hospital and ambulance station.

A suggestion to Mr Gibbs to remove the brick building to another location also proved impractical.

"We were quite happy to either purchase the building or lease it with a long term lease where we provided all the maintenance required to keep it up to standard and allow us to use it for accommodation for our workers," he said

But, Mr Gibbs said after having discussions with Wide Bay Health it was very definite in those conversations that the building needed to be removed and we would not be able to do anything else with it.

"It just seems to me it's bureaucracy over commonsense that the red tape involved in any of these sort of issues is far too great for anyone to take on," he said.

Mr Gibbs said the PALM scheme was also difficult and getting harder and harder to be part of because it was "over regulated".

He said delays between when they were told workers would arrive and when they actually arrived could be as long as several months.

"We'll say we need 10 workers in February, they will say 'yes, that's approved'.... then there will be a delay and it's usually red tape that holds all that up," he said.

"Those people will then be delayed from February to March. We've then had it extended from March to the end of April and May so you really go from planning to have 10 extra employees to having none for three months which makes it very hard to make business decisions.

"Our business at the moment, simply based on labour, is currently restricted by 25 per cent on what we can do and that's simply because of the difficulties in getting labour."

Mr Gibbs said a new worker also took 12 weeks to learn the basic skills of hygiene, knife skills, and workplace, health and safety before they can be used on the production line.

And, he said it took about 18 months to bring them through to be signed off as tradesmen.

Big Meats opened in August, 1999, and is a multi species domestic abattoir killing mostly pigs, but also lambs and goats. The company also processes cattle for its own MSA beef brand, Bottletree Beef.