Australia’s last journalist standing, Adele Ferguson, has done it again:
Gold Coast-based RFG is the country’s biggest food franchise operator, whose brands include Donut King, Brumby’s, Gloria Jean’s, Pizza Capers, Crust Gourmet Pizzas and Michel’s Patisserie. It has a market capitalisation of about $800 million and claims to have more than 2500 stores.
Since listing on the ASX in 2006 at $1 a share RFG has, for most of that time, produced record profits, double-digit returns on equity and fat dividend payouts for shareholders. In 2015 RFG stock hit $7.15. It built a reputation as a franchise amalgamator as it spent more than $500 million in the past decade on 15 acquisitions including Crust Gourmet Pizzas, Pizza Capers, coffee chain Gloria Jean’s, Café2U, DiBella Coffee and Hudson Pacific, a food manufacturer and distributor.
That scale has also seen it become one of the country’s largest coffee roasters, as it sells to its Brumby’s, Michel’s and Gloria Jean’s franchisees. In an Australian franchise sector estimated to be worth $146 billion in sales, and where there are four times as many franchisors per head here as in the US, RFG had become a serious player.
But it seems this phenomenal growth has come at a cost. A three-part investigation by Fairfax Media into RFG has uncovered a brutal business model that is pushing franchisees to the wall.
There is systemic wage fraud as franchisees do whatever it takes to make ends meet, the use of sham employment contracts and the underpayment of overseas workers hired on holiday visas.
As part of the investigation, Fairfax spoke to many current and former franchisees and workers. It obtained confidential franchise agreements and financial accounts, disclosure documents, marketing fund reports and internal correspondence between RFG and franchisees. It trawled through court cases and court records to piece together a complete picture of RFG.
And The Guardian:
A gap year in Australia on a working holiday visa was meant to be the experience of a lifetime. Instead…rural Australia [was] punctuated by intimidation and degrading incidents at the hands of male farmers.
…At one isolated farm a middle-aged farmer suggested she and her friend Elle Kerridge should pick fruit naked. At another, more disturbing forms of harassment occurred.
Foreign backpackers are particularly vulnerable to exploitation because they must spend 88 days in a rural area in order to secure a second year on their working holiday visas. A whole industry of hostels offering job services has sprung up as a result of the policy. But it has also meant that workers, particularly female workers, are prepared to endure harassing and even illegal behaviour to secure their second year here.
…A major study released last month by three Sydney universities, based on responses to an online survey by 4,322 foreign temporary workers, found workplace exploitation was “endemic and severe”.
The study by researchers at University of NSW, Sydney University and UTS found one third of backpackers earn $12 or less – well below the minimum wage.Exploitation in fruitpicking was particularly prevalent. The survey found that backpackers knew they were being underpaid but believed that few people on their visa could expect to receive the proper wage of $22.13 under the horticulture award.
We have seen this over and over again across Australia’s services and primary industries. With entire business lines, business models and sectors now hooked on the mass immigration class war business model.
This is the plain truth behind the major parties’ support for the mass immigration economic growth model:
- for the Coalition it is a fully intended profit-maximising business model that kills wages, boosts aggregate demand and lifts house prices. It intends no other outcome;
- Labor supports it with the intention of shaving off its roughest edges but that’s all;
- the Greens support it out of the Fake Left’s usual economically ignorant hypocrisy.
Bootleggers and Baptists all off the cliff together for incumbent residents and migrants alike.
