One would have thought that the global COVID-19 pandemic, the effective closure of Australia’s international border, and mass unemployment would have dampened calls from business lobbies to import cheap migrant labour.
Not so, with National Farmers Federation president, Fiona Simson, this week demanding “streamlined” regulations to make it easier to import migrant workers:
“The cost of labour for Australian farmers was among the highest in the world,” Ms Simson said, claiming wages accounted for more than 60 per cent of total production costs…
“Industrial relations reform as an economic stimulus can’t be underestimated”, Ms Simson said, arguing the government must extend migrant worker programs for the horticulture sector and “simplify and streamline” labour laws.
“Farmers and farm workers need an industrial relations system which is both fair and easy to implement,” she said.
Now let’s recall the abundant evidence showing that temporary migrants have been ruthlessly exploited on Australia’s farms.
In 2016, the Fair Work Ombudsman completed an inquiry into Australia’s backpacker visa scheme, which found that “many backpackers are being subjected to underpayment or non-payment, unlawful deductions, sexual harassment, unsafe working conditions and other forms of exploitation”.
The Senate report, entitled A National Disgrace: The Exploitation of Temporary Work Visa Holders, documented widespread abuse of Australia’s Working Holiday Maker visa program, which was “consistently reported to suffer widespread exploitation in the Australian workforce”.
The 2017 National Temporary Migrant Work Survey found that one in every seven temporary migrant fruit and vegetable pickers were paid $5 an hour or less, and a third $10 an hour or less.
In 2018, a group of academics jointly penned an article in Fairfax claiming that exploitation of temporary migrant farm workers is rife:
Australia already has more backpackers, and relies more strongly on them for horticultural work, than any country…
Unlike agricultural visas in New Zealand, Canada and the United States, and unlike Australia’s own Pacific seasonal worker program, there is no pre-approval of employers. Nor is there systematic ongoing regulation to ensure compliance with workplace laws…
Story after story after story have exposed exploitation on farms…
Finally, more “systemic exploitation” of migrant workers on Australia’s farms was exposed last year and this year.
Thankfully, political leaders and experts believe that new technology, not cheap migrant labour, is the key to driving growth instead:
Federal Agriculture Minister David Littleproud told the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age that public and private investment in new technology and infrastructure can “continue agriculture’s growth trajectory”, but lowering wages wasn’t an option.
“We’ve got to appreciate Australians enjoy a high standard of living and they don’t want to give that up,” Mr Littleproud said…
Labor agriculture spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon… said the top priority should be a “strategy for accelerating the adoption of technology”…
According to former NSW primary industries minister Niall Blair, now a professor of food sustainability at Charles Sturt University, industry will have to make cutting-edge technology commonplace to remain profitable.
“We won’t compete on brute labour force,” he said. “We have to work smarter through the supply chain.”
Too right. Allowing farms to pluck cheap migrants in lieu of paying higher wages to local workers discourages them from innovating and adopting labour saving technologies, which would boost the economy’s overall productivity. It also prevents creative destruction by enabling low productivity farms to remain in business.
Put another way, stemming the flow of low-wage migrants onto farms would force the least productive ones to shrink and go bust, transferring workers, land and capital to more productive businesses, thus raising average productivity across the economy. Further, all farms, observing higher wages, would invest more in labour saving technologies and restructure to raise productivity.
There’s a reason why farms in advanced nations typically involve a handful of workers operating heavy machinery, whereas in low-wage developing countries farms are manned by many workers doing manual labour. The higher cost of labour in advanced countries forces farms to invest in labour saving machinery, which lifts productivity.
The key ingredient for Australian agriculture to flourish is productivity-enhancing automation, not migrant slave labour.
