Earlier this year, the Senate Education and Employment References Committee released a scathing report entitled A National Disgrace: The Exploitation of Temporary Work Visa Holders, which documented the abuses of Australia’s temporary visa system for foreign workers.
The most damning assessments from the Committee were regarding Australia’s Working Holiday Maker (WHM) and student visa holders, who were “consistently reported to suffer widespread exploitation in the Australian workforce”.
Specifically on the WHM (417 and 462) visa program, the Committee noted the following:
A substantial body of evidence to this inquiry demonstrated blatant and pervasive abuse of the WHM visa program by a network of labour hire companies supplying 417 visa workers to businesses in the horticulture sector and the meat processing industry.
It was clear from the evidence that these labour hire companies have a particular business model. There are a number of labour hire companies in Australia with close links to labour hire agencies in certain south-east Asian countries… The scale of the abuse is extraordinary, both in terms of the numbers of young temporary visa workers involved, and also in terms of the exploitative conditions that they endure…
On completion of their ‘training’, the 417 visa workers were given a job where they were required to work regular 12 to 18 hour shifts 6 days a week. They were frequently denied proper breaks and often had to keep working or return to work early after suffering workplace injuries. The pay rates were appalling. Most received around a flat $11 or $12 an hour irrespective of whether this was the night shift, the weekend, or overtime hours. These wage rates are illegal and clearly breach award minimums…
Poor or non-existent record-keeping was endemic across the labour hire companies mentioned in this inquiry. This has serious implications for ensuring compliance with legal minimum conditions of employment. The 417 visa workers never met the head labour hire contractor and only had a mobile number to receive texts about the start time for their next shift. The committee received many documents including fake timesheets and envelopes with a figure scrawled on it instead of a proper timesheet. The workers were paid in cash with no deductions for tax.
When the shift was over, these workers returned to squalid and overcrowded accommodation with no proper facilities, for which they were charged exorbitant levels of rent by the labour hire contractor. The rent payments were deducted straight from the workers’ pay packets, most of the time in clear contravention of the law…
Today, Fairfax has revealed yet another example of mistreatment of temporary foreign workers, with young Asian workers making cheesecakes and muffins for a supplier to Coles and Woolworths ripped-off by a labour-hire company:
The Federal Circuit Court fined Sydney woman Yan Hu $17,556 – her company Global Express Consultancy Pty Ltd has been penalised a further $87,783 – after she admitted underpaying 19 employees from Taiwan and Hong Kong on 417 working holiday visas a total of more than $45,000.
The Fair Work Ombudsman said Hu paid employees flat rates of $16 to $18 an hour, resulting in underpayment of the minimum hourly award rates, casual loadings, Saturday penalty rates and overtime rates.
Ms Hu also unlawfully deducted bonds of up to $400 from some of the employees’ wages, to be returned if they stayed with her company for at least six months and were not “lazy”. Laws requiring pay slips were also breached.
Judge Justin Smith found that Ms Hu, who migrated to Australia from China as an international student in 1999, was “very frank”.
“I find that Global deliberately sought to engage foreign nationals as employees because of Ms Hu’s opinion, which she willingly shared … that they were ‘younger, cheaper and faster than locals who are old and slow’,” Judge Smith said…
Despite paying below award rates, Ms Hu said she had been “reasonable” but her employees had been “greedy”.
It sure feels like Groundhog Day, with abuse and rorting of Australia’s foreign worker visa system ongoing and seemingly widespread.
