Story: Pacific Islands and New Zealand

These Tongan and Samoan women working on an Auckland factory's fish processing line in 1977 were part of a wave of Pacific immigrants after the Second World War. Production lines in factories absorbed many of the new arrivals, who in some industries were in the majority. This made them particularly vulnerable when New Zealand manufacturing collapsed in the late 1980s. In the early 1990s around a quarter of Pacific people in New Zealand were unemployed (a much higher rate than that of Pākehā New Zealanders, and slightly higher than that of Māori). These patterns of employment in low-paid occupations and higher unemployment rates continued for Pacific peoples in the 2000s.