New Zealand’s High-Risk Industry Workers Need Priority Access to Wills and Estate Planning Services

While most of us rarely give much thought to workplace deaths in New Zealand until they hit the headlines, closely examining the data for the past 10 years is a sobering exercise. Take the agriculture industry alone (this includes dairy, poultry and meat farming and production, fruit, vegetable and other crop growing, and more); in the last year, WorkSafe recorded 17 agricultural workers being killed at work, and since 2014 between nine and 23 workers in this sector have died annually in the course of doing their jobs.[1]

I apologise for delivering such a grim introduction, but unfortunately it is not just workplace health and safety that is trending in the wrong direction; we also struggle, as a nation of hard workers, with the idea of planning for our family’s future when it no longer includes us. Indeed, with the exception of the New Zealand Defence Force, which partnered with Aon and Footprint to provide Wills and other estate planning services to all staff and members, the state of New Zealand’s high-risk industries (these are often rural and include forestry and logging; fishing, hunting and trapping; agriculture and aquaculture; coal mining; construction; and police and fire services) is very different.

We already know up to 63% of full-time workers across all industries do not have a Will, and a broad overview from Statista, Figure.nz, Fire and Emergency, and careers.govt.nz shows that around 120,000 people are employed in the agriculture, forestry and fishing industry; 14,000 in NZ Police and around 1,800 career firefighters and 11,800 volunteers; at least 170,000 in construction; and 576 people are still working in mining. If nearly two-thirds of these (and other) high-risk workers are unprotected by a Will and estate plan, including orders of guardianship for minor children, the flow-on risk to their families is enough to make you shudder.

Notably, as the pandemic taught us, some of those facing the greatest workplace danger are those in the healthcare sector, who may take the risk of being exposed to life-threatening pathogens in the course of doing their jobs. They should be treated as high-risk workers too.

The absence of protection afforded by estate planning places disproportionate risk on the unprotected families of these workers. Not only are workers in more danger in an average day than urban employees in office, retail and hospitality spaces, they are by virtue of their professions less likely to have engaged with standard estate planning services than, say, white-collar workers, who are typically more exposed to financial and fiduciary planning as a natural consequence of their professional activities.

Richard Wagstaff, CTU president, is on record as saying death and injury should not be accepted as the natural cost of doing business, and the best employers who take care of their staff should be showcased. I agree.

As an unavoidably high-risk organisation, NZDF, with the support of Aon, has taken a leadership position to ensure protection for its members and those who depend on them – but too many high-risk Kiwi workers and their families lack the protection of a Will, which should be a no-brainer as a basic provision, and arguably fully covered or at least subsidised by Government in order to ensure high rates of take-up.

It is widely accepted that people working in certain industries face a greater degree of danger when they go to work, but taboos around talking about death mean we avoid discussing how best to protect people – and tragically, the WorkSafe statistics do the talking.

There is a better alternative: Government, high-risk industry leaders, and estate planning and financial services providers can work together to deliver what might be called “protection packages” which include legal documents (Wills, Enduring Powers of Attorney, family trusts) along with education, access and other tools for financial wellbeing, such as life insurance and income protection insurance. This can be done in an affordable and easily accommodated way for all parties, and it is actionable now – the service providers have capacity to scale up and work with large organisations quickly.

Clearly, we have a larger problem with worker safety in high-risk industries; our rates of workplace injury and death are too high and represent a pressing issue for Government and industry to solve. But at the very least, we can ensure that if the worst happens, families aren’t left without protection and a plan for what happens next. Those on the frontlines of our key industries deserve it.

Angela Vale is the former Chief Executive Officer of Footprint, a world-first provider of a digital subscription service offering Wills and estate administration as part of employee benefits packages, and New Zealand’s largest provider of online Wills.

[1] Source: https://data.worksafe.govt.nz/graph/detail/fatalities?industry=Agriculture