It’s been more than three years since the Senate Education and Employment References Committee released its 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.
And still the exploitation continues with a large supermarket pizza manufacturer the latest to be accused of ripping off migrant workers by $1 million:
A group of 21 former employees of Della Rosa – one of Australia’s largest supermarket pizza manufacturers – have launched legal action in the Federal Court through the United Workers Union over years of alleged mistreatment.
Vikram Singh worked at Della Rosa for three years and believes he is owed tens of thousands of dollars…
Sunil Kumar said he was bullied out of the company for joining the union and when he left in 2017, he was not paid out any of his entitlements because the company said it had lost his records…
“Exploitation of migrant workers and wage theft was part of the day-to-day business,” the union’s Susie Allison told reporters at the Federal Court on Wednesday.
“They’ve been called animals and (subjected to) blatant statements like ‘we don’t like Indians here’.”
The claim dates back to 2013 and it’s believed some workers are owed about $60,000.
The former employees are collectively seeking one million dollars from the company in alleged unpaid wages and entitlements.
Lawyers say the case highlights just how vulnerable migrant workers can be.
This is Australia’s mass immigration slave economy in action. Specifically:
- students, visa holders, tourists all work well below the minimum wage while they hope to qualify for longer-terms visas; and
- their numbers grow endlessly, and so too does the oversupply in the labour market.
The result is that virtually every sector of the Australian economy has been flooded with cheap migrant labour, thus eroding worker bargaining power, industrial relations standards, and facilitating wage theft.
Australia’s chronic low wage growth will not be solved until the mass immigration rort is closed.
Leith van Onselen
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I honestly don’t give a sh1t about Vikram and Sunil. They’re not my countrymen. The only sad thing about this is that they’ve taken work from actual Australians and contributed to the overall lowering of wages and living standards of everybody else.
+1
Right on, and every one of these scamming cnuts knew exactly what they were doing. Noting no mention of their visa type or circumstances of entry into Australia, in line with the SBS Ministry of Truth.
On the plus side, if you do go to the SBS article it looks like we’re now importing narcoleptic vibrants as well. So there’s that at least!
you should be sorry for them because it was your (and our) countryman who brought them here to be exploited
you saying that is not much different from Americans 150 years ago saying they don’t care about southern slaves but fellow Americans who got their job taken by those slaves.
WTF?
There is a substantial difference between people who are captured, imprisoned and transported against their will to another country to be…you know…slaves, versus people who voluntarily apply to move to another country of their own free will and go through all the processes to do that because they think it would benefit them to do so. That is why we have the words “slaves” for the first category of people and “immigrants” for the latter category.
I didn’t ask the immigrants to come here. It was their choice. If it turns out that the benefits they were looking for don’t arise and things aren’t as good as they expected why should I care about that? They can always return to wherever they came from or go to another country if this place doesn’t meet their expectations. Meanwhile, I do care about the effects that their presence here has on the wages and conditions of employment that my children will be working under.
Highly skilled pizza dough rollers? Fcuk that noise, they’re an imposition and a burden on our society. We’d be better off without them.
you are confusing a choice with fraud
they agreed to come here under very different conditions, none agreed to come to be exploited and have a life style worse than back home
BTW. many west african slaves voluntarily boarded ships because they were promised christian paradise on the other side, hunting and capturing people was used only to make sure ships are full
Worked in the M.E. for a few yrs back in the mid 2000s. They had 10s of 1000s of subcontinent workers there, flights between the ME and the subcont were virtually just for moving them backwards and forwards, so you’s think they’d be aware of the treatment to expect on their arrival. But no, I guess desperation drives them to ignore what they’re told so come they do. I guess here is the same, those who go back and warn are derided as liars etc and mind you, it’s Australia, it couldn’t be true, so desperation overcomes logic.
There is a sucker born every minute.
$10/hour is heaven compared to whatever they get in Dubai.
“Wage growth, what was that Dad?”
“It’s what politicians and public servants get every year, son.”
That would be “senior public servants” for the most part. Still better than private sector, but EBAs are pretty slow going forward.
Unless you just lost your job in Scummos latest restructure
Vikram and Sunil, they’d be on that “skilled visa” time, right? I mean, working for a pizza maker. Demanding, and rigorous job I’m sure, requiring “supreme” skills.
Indeedly-deed. Pizza dough rollers FFS. Highly-skilled my hairy ar$e.
Jesus Christ, I walk around in a constant state of low-level outrage these days as every new revelation of greed, corruption and stupidity bubbles it’s way to the surface.
+1 on the low-level outrage.
It seems everywhere you turn, there is some cvnt on the take or getting away with rorts, corruption etc. etc. I’m am no longer surprised by anything anymore.
To help ease your pain, I’m always giving them a 1 star rating when they pick me up in their newly leased Uber vehicles…after they leave the pizza factory.
Thanks to whoever it was on here who gave me the idea.
I’ve been doing this for a while too. Does this actually result in a loss of job with Uber now though?
No, I think what it means is they stop bugging you to rate your driver…
Can they rate you? What if they say you are an octopus with extremely questionable hygiene habits and adverse political views?
yes they can and do!
Sure – but what else do you expect people to do? Sunil/Vikram did not create the laws which government immigration into Oz, and sure as hell had no ability to manage the (lack of) enforcement of the same laws. I wonder who got paid to ensure the lack of immigration law enforcement.
Are Sunil/Vikram trying to game the system. Probably. Play the cards you are dealt right? But its a pretty good chance that they were lied to by middlemen on the way to Australia too – land of milk and honey and all that.
Unfortunately for everyday Australia, a bunch of elites with no ideas for the future were perfectly happy to game the system, screwing over everyday Oz, young Australian job seekers and Sunil/Vikram.
And now the system is so messed up, that there is no choice but to keep importing Sunil/Vikram (insert any suitably stupid foreigner with ability to fog a mirror and/or qualify for a credit line) – until folks stop coming because the horror stories get so bad.
Which will probably happen in the next few years anyways. Mixed blessing I suppose, large number of foreigners stop coming/start leaving, but its only because of the horror stories the populace will now have to endure.
Whilst I hope you’re right, I don’t think these horror stories will result in the tap running dry. For each guy that goes home with his tail between his legs, there is another 20 that think they can do better for whatever reason and will jump at the opportunity.
On the other hand, when locals start lashing out at any new arrival as our taps literally run dry, that might help the situation. Whilst day zero in Sydney will be horrendous, the silver lining is we may get our country back in some way.
What are these “locals” of which you speak?
you are right
what media is trying to do now is to push blame onto Sunil/Vikram from our political and corporate elite
This is how modern serfdom looks like. Pretty fitting for a banana republic.
Straya could have lowered the land prices and remained competitive even with relatively expensive labor costs. But, ah no, Strayans wouldn’t bear falling land prices. So the rest is inevitable.
Lower land prices? What about the debt attached to them?
LVR is the only measure of risk used, so it has to be maintained.
Plus think about how valuations work, once one piece of land falls all of the pieces around it fall too.
Simply can’t happen.
Vikram Singh and Sunil Kumar knew exactly before they got off the plane from India they would be working & living illegally.
They will have both colluded with the foreign criminal agent procurer to get false documents, the fake health checks and a pretext visa to get into Australia to steal an Australian’s job and housing.
They will then have lives & worked illegally, 10 to a 2 bed unit in some migrant infested slum, and actively participated in the false timesheets, cash back, paying bribes & working illegally.
Only when they didn’t get the PR – will they ‘complain they were victims’ & ‘I’m going to join the Union’ etc.
All part of the predictable pathway.
They they will apply for a protection visa, full work rights & get granted another 5 years in Australia, going thru the facade of the appeals process.
And try to garner ‘public sympathy’ that they are a special case and so should be given a PR.
How many like this?
We already have 205,000 of such third world lowlife scamming the protection visa racket.
Behind that is a stacked many hundreds of thousands of third world migrant guestworkers allowed in on the visa rackets & who will do the same.
Anything to try to extend or churn their visas.
So let’s see the entire story.
Make public all the records on Vikram Singh & Sunil Kumar in how they entered Australia, on what visa pretext, their documents, the Indian police history, their supposed skills, where they were living, how many others at that address, who they paid rent to. their financial records & remittances, the loans, bribes and payments made to their agent procurers.
What I say will be correct.
And they should be immediately deported for their fraud & visa breach.
They exploited Australia, its as simple as that.
Let’s see the complete story on these two.
Not this faux ‘made for silly naive Aussie sympathy’ – “oh I was exploited” , “give me a PR” nonsense.
Obviously they’re exploted because their wages are far too high. Easy to end the exploitation, just pay them $0. End exploitation now!
Seriously though, they had best be very careful in this environment of extreme debt to start campaigning that people’s wages must be forced up. I mean that’s all well and good and ideological, but realistically where are these extra wages coming from?
Any spare wage capacity that was freed by the employment of these slaves has long been attached to debt, and there it will remain, servicing it, for the best part of 30 years from the date of attachment.
To now say that the stolen wage capacity has to be returned is very worrying because what will happen to the debt? What will need to give out as a result?
The answer is simple. Rocketing unemployment.
It certainly isn’t going to result in rocketing wages, as these slave-sympathisers expect because there’s just no extra money just laying around to make that happen .
And prices can rise all they want, it is a zero sum game in this environment of extreme debt, sales will simply fall proportionately.
This lawsuit is great news for Australians, once the wage disparity gap is eroded between Indians/Chines and Australians there will be no point hiring them.