Via Sarah Dankert and company over the weekend, who have done a great job exposing the abuses of the franchising system:
Wayne Hong, who owns a Michel’s Patisserie – another RFG chain – in Knox Shopping Centre in Wantirna, in Melbourne’s east, said he was not surprised to learn of the mass store closures.
…“These people are living like a king, and make us working like a slave,” Mr Hong said.
…The oil giant will bring all 810 of its Australian petrol stations under company control by 2020, drawing a line under a wage scandal that has dogged the company over the past 15 months despite the company insisting the move has little to do its franchisees breaching agreements.
…Domino’s half-year result further raised concerns in the investment community about how much profit share head office took from its Australian franchisee stores.
Franchisees struggling to turn a profit was one of the factors driving widespread wage fraud in the company’s network, uncovered by Fairfax Media last year.
And Adele Ferguson today:
…The FWO’s investigation found a 76 per cent failure rate from the 25 stores it had audited, a figure that would do nothing to help the Caltex brand, which has already been battered by a wage fraud scandal exposed by Fairfax Media in late 2016.
…In Caltex’s case it had an added twist, with stories emerging of workers threatened with violence and in one case sending hit men to visit their family in Pakistan to guarantee their silence.
Some workers were paid $12 an hour in cash, which is less than half the award rate, some sleeping on mattresses at the back of the store to reduce travel time; some franchisees sponsored workers on a visa or paid for their education so they could stay in this country and work like slaves.
Add 7/11 and Woolies cleaners to the list, not to mention the countless examples of itinerant worker abuse. All of the these franchise businesses are dogged by wage abuse scandals because they have internalised Australia’s mass immigration business model. It’s not that they couldn’t have underpaid locals over the years. They could. But when you have an open borders policy that draws in hundreds of thousands of cheap foreign workers that would like to immigrate every year, the potential for labour market abuse expands exponentially as hard-working but vulnerable visa-holder are willing to do the unsociable.
If you run your economy in this way then why would you wonder when it ultimately kills wider wages growth, as well as the migrants.
