Jason Clare, the Federal Opposition’s spokesman on trade and investment, has penned an article in The AFR today noting that employers would have been able to recruit overseas workers under the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) without first offering the positions to local workers, and calling for future ‘free trade agreements’ (FTAs) to ensure greater protection for Australian workers:
One of the problems with the TPP is the Turnbull government agreed that companies could bring in workers from Canada, Peru, Mexico, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam without first checking whether Australian workers could do the job.
These are the sort of things that make middle and working class Australians angry. Surely before a company brings in an electrician or a carpenter or a mechanic from overseas they should first have to go through the basic process of seeing if an Australian can do the job.
That’s what most Australians expect. And fair enough. The 457 visa is supposed to supplement the Australian workforce not replace it. The government could also do a lot more to crackdown on the dodgy companies and labour hire firms rorting the current system, bringing overseas workers to do jobs that unemployed Australians could do and often underpaying them.
Well done to Labor for raising this issue and taking a stand.
That said, it is a shame that Labor caved-in and supported the China-Australia FTA when it could have instead backed The Greens in opposing the deal. While Labor did manage to negotiate some useful worker safeguards via amendments to the Migration Act, these do not go nearly far enough in protecting Australian jobs from imported Chinese labour (see here and here).
Still, Labor’s position is far more commendable to the Coalition’s, which continues to pursue in earnest spurious trade deals with hidden costs to the Australian public.
