Greg Jericho hypocrite really should get out more

By in Australian Economy, Featured Article

| 20 comments

More pretending to care from Greg Jericho over the weekend:

It probably should be no surprise that last night’s royal wedding became part of the political debate this week. But the criticism by government members highlighted yet again the Liberal party’s policy of pretending to care about something while simultaneously doing everything to work against it.

…And of course, economic policy is not excused from the pretence of care or accompanying lack of policy.

The latest wage growth figures showed yet again that wages have not risen in real terms in the past year. This is a problem for the government because, while the Liberal party has long been a champion of keeping wages growth down in the name of “competitiveness”, its budget is very much in favour of it.

…Right now the only wages policy is company tax cuts in the hope that increased investment will improve productivity, which will then (eventually) flow through into stronger wage growth.

…But in the meantime, the Liberal party has actively sought to reduce workers’ collective bargaining power through increased intervention in union activity, cheered the removal of penalty rates, and strenuously argued against any government intervention that might see a greater increase in the minimum wage.

All true. The joke, as we know, is that Jericho is even more guilty. How? He is all in favour of wages theft:

I must admit, to my ongoing shame I once wrote an article where I noted favourably some fairly simplistic research that suggested most of the employment from 2011 to 2014 was from migrants.

Sometimes numbers can beguile because they seem to provide a straightforward solution – if employment for example has increased by 400,000 over three years and in that time 380,000 migrants have been employed, it seems obvious that most of the jobs must be going to migrants.

And before you know it you are proffering arguments that would have you arm in arm with any number of racists slowly walking past with a grudge to bear and a desire to blame anyone else.

Similarly spurious is the argument that we should first improve infrastructure before then increasing our migrant intake. What you find is those arguing this path never reach a point of thinking it is time to allow greater migration – even if things are good, they never wish to increase migration because they inherently view it as a negative that will clog up roads, reduce wages, increase crime …

Immigration – because there are many desperate to hate – must be treated with extreme care by politicians and journalists, and certainly with more care than Abbott seems capable. The inherently racist parties will seek to use any discussion and any seeming evidence of the negative impact of migrants as fuel to burn their fires of hate.

The Guardian itself underlined the lunacy of this position at the weekend:

Toni Buckley says being a victim of wage theft in the hospitality industry “more times than I care to remember” prompted her to take legal action in the small claims division of Melbourne magistrate’s court against her former cafe employer.

A 58-year-old widow with a mortgage, she had been working in the hospitality industry for 20 years when her most recent employer told her and her eight co-workers, with five days’ notice, that they would be unemployed.

“I contacted the Fair Work Ombudsman but was told they really couldn’t do anything as they only act as mediation between the two parties,” Buckley tells Guardian Australia.

“The employer refused to pay redundancy or pay in-lieu-of-notice and had not paid the compulsory superannuation contributions.”

She took the cafe owners to court and a settlement was reached, but she is not allowed to speak about the business negatively as a condition of that settlement and so the cafe cannot be named.

“The exploitation within the industry is rampant and something needs to be done,” Buckley says. “I encourage anybody who is in this position to persevere with their claim.”

A lecturer in work and organisational studies at the University of Sydney business school, Dr Stephen Clibborn, says the Fair Work Ombudsman does not have the funding or the power to deal with the tens of thousands of hospitality workers such as Buckley whose wages and superannuation are stolen by their bosses each year.

“Unfortunately the ombudsman has never been adequately resourced to fulfil that job on its own and it has been going backwards in its funding,” Clibborn says.

“The revenue the ombudsman receives from government is considerably less now than five years ago. Part of addressing growing wage theft is having a strong and well-funded labour enforcement agency.”

But not everyone has the time or knowledge to navigate the court system either, he said, especially migrant workers with language barriers or backpackers who might only be in the country for a few months.

Laura Meek, who came to Australia as a backpacker from Scotland in 2015, tells Guardian Australia she has worked at more than a dozen hospitality businesses in Australia. Only one paid her properly. “I have been legally entitled to superannuation payments, a minimum wage, payslips, legal break allowances and penalty rates,” she says.

As protests erupt in migrant dominated sectors, also at Jericho’spaper:

A food delivery rider has told a Sydney protest his wages have dropped significantly over the two-and-a-half years he has been riding for one of the major delivery companies in Australia.

Wednesday’s protest was held before riders and the Transport Workers Union appeared at the Fair Work Commission’s annual review of award wages.

“When I started two-and-a-half years ago, the standard contract was $14 an hour and $5 dollars a delivery,” rider Matt told reporters. “Those are now looked at as the golden old days. I now know riders that are doing $7 a delivery and zero dollars an hour – these guys are making $14, $7 or zero dollars an hour.”

Not to mention Domainfax:

Tulia Roqara hoped to make enough money picking tomatoes at a farm outside Shepparton to be able set up a pastry shop back in Vanuatu.

Instead, after five months of gruelling work, Ms Roqara will return home next week to her two young sons with next to nothing.

She was one of a group of about 50 workers from Vanuatu paid as little as $8 an hour under what is meant to be Australia’s most stringent temporary migrant worker scheme.

And again today from franchise inquiry:

The inquiry has set up secret hearings alongside the public hearings as franchisees are concerned about franchisors tracking and stalking them.

Senator O’Neill says the number of confidential submissions is “extraordinarily high” and “reveals a culture of oppression and cover up that appears quite widespread in the franchising industry”.

Former Foodco franchisee Faheem Mirza has made a submission to the inquiry detailing how he lost everything operating two Muffin Break stores in Rhodes and Burwood in New South Wales.

Mr Mirza says he is aware of more than 20 Foodco franchisees who have made submissions, although the majority of them are confidential because of fear of repercussions.

Mr Mirza says Foodco’s business model is fake, its labour costs “a mathematical impossibility” and that Foodco expects all franchisees work for free.

Not if your real business is selling visas!

This comes at the end of a VERY long list evidence that’s been piling higher for years about Australia’s mass immigration program destroying labour market standards. For five years MB has reported on entire business lines, firms and sectors across Australia whose business models include turning their labour bill into a profit centre via visa fraud: in fast food, convenience stores, agriculture, building, accounting, IT, engineering, education, transport, the gig economy, agriculture and no doubt it is even more widespread

The scam is rife in both skilled and unskilled streams. Since the 7-Eleven migrant worker scandal broke in 2015, there has been a regular flow of stories emerging about the systemic abuse of Australia’s various migrant worker programs and visa system.

  • The issue culminated in 2016 when the Senate Education and Employment References Committee released a scathing report entitled A National Disgrace: The Exploitation of Temporary Work Visa Holders, which documented systemic abuses of Australia’s temporary visa system for foreign workers.
  • Mid last year, ABC’s 7.30 Report ran a disturbing expose on the modern day slavery occurring across Australia.
  • Meanwhile, Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO), Natalie James, told Fairfax in August last year that people on visas continue to be exploited at an alarming rate, particularly those with limited English-language skills. It was also revealed that foreign workers are involved in more than three-quarters of legal cases initiated by the FWO against unscrupulous employers.
  • Then The ABC reported that Australia’s horticulture industry is at the centre of yet another migrant slave scandal, according to an Australian Parliamentary Inquiry into the issue.
  • The same Parliamentary Inquiry was told by an undercover Malaysian journalist that foreign workers in Victoria were “brainwashed” and trapped in debt to keep them on farms.
  • A recent UNSW Sydney and UTS survey painted the most damning picture of all, reporting that wages theft is endemic among international students, backpackers and other temporary migrants.
  • A few weeks ago, Fair Work warned that most of Western Sydney had become a virtual special economic zone in which two-thirds of businesses were underpaying workers, with the worst offenders being high-migrant areas.
  • Dr Bob Birrell from the Australian Population Research Institute, whose latest report is based on 2016 Census data, revealed that most recently arrived skilled migrants (i.e. arrived between 2011 and 2016) cannot find professional jobs, with only 24% of skilled migrants from Non-English-Speaking-Countries (who comprise 84% of the total skilled migrant intake) employed as professionals as of 2016, compared with 50% of skilled migrants from Main English-Speaking-Countries and 58% of the same aged Australian-born graduates:These results accord with a recent survey from the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre, which found that 53% of skilled migrants in Western Australia said they are working in lower skilled jobs than before they arrived, with underemployment also rife.
  • The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) latest Characteristics of Recent Migrants report, revealed that migrants have generally worse labour market outcomes than the Australian born population, with recent migrants and temporary residents having an unemployment rate of 7.4% versus 5.4% for the Australian born population, and lower labour force participation (69.8%) than the Australian born population (70.2%).
  • ABC Radio recently highlighted the absurdity of Australia’s ‘skilled’ migration program in which skilled migrants have grown increasingly frustrated at not being able to gain work in Australia despite leaving their homelands to fill so-called ‘skills shortages’. As a result, they are now demanding that taxpayers provide government-sponsored internships to help skilled migrants gain local experience, and a chance to work in their chosen field.
  • Then there’s today’s new research discussed at the ABC documenting the complete corruption of the temporary visas system.

These are only the highlights. I could go and on. We’ve lost count of the individual cases of fraud which pile up every single day across the media.

It is easily explained by one chart:

Post-mining boom, authorities unleashed a flood of foreign workers into the oversupplied labour market. We are thus brimming with excess capacity. Drowning in it. Foreign workers are happy to get paid less, endure lower conditions and work more unsociable hours. Employers are only too happy to oblige. Training is forgotten. Apprenticeships have crashed. Wages are falling. And there is much more of it ahead.

There is no governing, regulating or policing this tsunami of people. It’s not systemic corruption, it has become the system itself, as we import emerging market conditions into the Australian labour market it drives a proliferation of ever more ‘cheap labour’ businesses.

Every neighborhood in the country is now chock full of brothels, massages, cafes, fast food, pedicure and beauty, hair, car washes, petrol, bakeries, $2 shops, convenience stores, transport: built, staffed and cleaned by the underpaid. Even the professions are overrun as unscrupulous industry bodies and training institutes clip the ticket on a deluge of foreign entrants in engineering, IT, accounting, medicine and more.

Every niche or crevice in the services economy is disrupted and glutted by exploited labour. The scam is so huge that it has lowered wages and inflation plus interest rates, driving up house prices and allowing us to over-consume these very same services. It’s become a structural adjustment.

We’ve royally, massively, hugely jumped the shark on cheap migrant labour and Greg Jericho needs to either leave whatever rock he is hiding under or bow out of the debate.

David Llewellyn-Smith
Latest posts by David Llewellyn-Smith (see all)

Comments

  1. marked64

    Shut down the cafe sector and issue every Australian with a tin of Nescafe 43. Run by wankers to serve wankers while ripping off the kiddies. Nescafe is all they deserve.

    • Dan

      When you here about the joys of inner city “vibrancy” and “multiculturalism” 90% of what that means is cheap ethnic restaurants (very few people participate in other intercultural exchanges). These are cheap, largely because workers are exploited. There is no other way.

    • MalMEMBER

      Or Maccas, home of legal tax minimisation. Tax of 100 mill, after income reduced by 350 mill of “royalty” ie franchise loyalty payments paid to the tax haven of Britain (with 17 % company tax, minus deductions…). Bring on the turnover tax on foreign companies. And another 50 c on a Big Mac.

  4. mike mb

    Nope – these migrants on temporary visas or ‘tourists & visitors working illegally are ‘willing participants’ in job theft, cash in hand, underground & black market labor, illicit & vice activities. It’s why they are here.

    So a minor correction to the article.
    “Every neighborhood in the country is now chock full of brothels, massages, cafes, fast food, pedicure and beauty, hair, car washes, petrol, bakeries, $2 shops, convenience stores, transport: built, staffed and cleaned by over 2.7 million WILLINGLY EXPLOITED THIRD WORLD MIGRANT GUESTWORKERS.
    (2.2 MILLION TEMPORARY VISA & 440,000 TOURISTS WORKING ILLEGALLY – ABF ESTIMATE) – MOST WORKING ILLEGALLY ON A WIDE VARIETY OF PRETEXT VISAS & ALIBIS.
    Even the professions are overrun as unscrupulous industry bodies and training institutes clip the ticket on a deluge of foreign entrants in engineering, IT, accounting, medicine and more”.

    Time to call it out as it really is.

    Not exploited.
    WILLING third world unskilled migrant guestworker participants – procured and facilitated in by foreign criminal syndicates & agent procurers on a splendid array of pretext visas & alibis.
    Most in a loan debt/Fake funds etc to that foreign agent procurer.
    To enter Australia to work illegally cash in hand no tax paid, below award or in vice.
    To be repay their procurer debt, send back remittances and try to secure a PR as an anchor to bring in their family, elderly sick as a further burden to Australia.

  6. truthisfashionable

    If you read the parts written by HnH in the voice of David Attenborough it makes it feel like you are really getting a glimpse of a mind that has ended up in a position that didn’t use reason or evidence to arrive there.

    • SupernovaMEMBER

      What a good idea……expel the academics and scientists (inadequate rationality) and replace them with robots

  7. astrolin

    Jericho may need to get out more, there needs to be less reliance around here on spell check. “Not if you’re real business is selling visas!”…………….you’re?? really? The wrong word spelt correctly is still the wrong word.

  8. d672c804897d

    An excellent post, and I could not have put it better.

    I share the rage at what has been allowed to happen.

    It looks like your keyboard barely survived that outpouring – and rightly so. I can only imagine how much more outraged you would be if you had 24 hours behind the scenes to observe what is going on in the public hospital system at present, specifically the staggering level of resources being expended on people who have been in the country less than 10 years and in many cases have never worked or paid taxes.

    • mike mb

      Re migrant intake, taxation contribution & welfare & health care impacts.
      Productivity Commission / ABS data.
      Migrant cost Impacts (and ’persistence’ of that impact).
      The ABS and Productivity Commission Migrant Intake Report 2016 shows clearly that new PR/ Citizenship Migrant individuals and families earn less than Australian averages, have higher unemployment and consume more health care & welfare cost than Australian averages. https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/migrant-intake/report/migrant-intake-report-overview.pdf Page 10 has charts on this.
      Interestingly they note that as the migrants age, their contribution goes down and health and welfare costs go up, so we what we see from the migrant intake currently is actually their ‘peak performance’, and it will only get worse.

      The ABS (2015 ABS Migrant outcomes study) estimates were that each Migrant individual contributed $2,500 per year less in income/tax contribution, had higher welfare & health care costs of $2,500 yearly, plus associated housing, public infrastructure, transport, congestion and other impacts costing the community $3,000.
      So each Migrant individual on average was an $8,000 yearly cost burden, compared to average Australians.

      They note this $8,000 cost burden per year ‘persists’ for Migrants for at least five years until they are ‘established’. However many other reports noted that new Migrants from the Middle East, China, South East Asia, India, Bangladesh and Africa are persisting’ for longer in low contribution and cost impact, often for a decade or even intergenerational (Lebanese, Middle East, Afghan, Chinese PRC, Malay).

      Using the most generous figure of only 5 year sub-par contribution and higher cost persistence – 200,000 Migrants each year at an average negative $8,000 cost impact is $1.6 billion a year, every year for at least 5 years. ($8 billion cost over 5 years, $16 billion over 10 years).

      So 200,000 migrants each year will cost Australia $8 billion over a 5 year period, and more likely $16 billion over 10 years period.

      The last decade’s intake of 2 million PR and Citizenship Migrants has cost Australia at least $64 billion, and based on the more likely 10 year sub- par contribution and cost, closer to $160 billion.

      Over the 10 year period that is a $6,600 impact to every Australian, and $17,000 cost impact to every Australian Household.

      We allowed in over 2 million PR & citizenship graves of which 1.5 million were third world unskilled migrants, who are & will continue to be a burden in below average contribution, and high social welfare & health care costs.

      Most based on the trend in their ethnic groupings will continue and get worse in this lack of contribution and cost impact.

      So says the Productivity Commission / ABS

  9. kurt

    I haven’t seen much on how immigration affects productivity. My understanding is that wealth is basically a factor of productivity not low wages ( high wage/productivity places like Germany). In fact, high immigration, by driving down wages actually removes incentives for employers to invest in machinery and other productivity boosting measures.