From the fake left Guardian today:
Naomi is planning to fight a wage theft case against her former employer – thanks in part to a group of Chinese international students and travellers on working holiday visas who have begun to expose allegations of predatory behaviour by employers.
In what is an open secret, bosses are allegedly exploiting the lack of knowledge around Australia’s industrial relations system among migrant communities – particularly where they speak languages other than English – hiring people into jobs that pay as little as $5 an hour.
Within the South Australian Chinese community, these roles are often advertised on AdelaideBBS.com, a Chinese-language news aggregator and community noticeboard.
Many of the advertisements listed on the site do not state the rate of pay and, even where they do list it, these rates can be be lowered during negotiations that take place by text message or in person.
Job listings on AdelaideBBS.com carry a disclaimer saying the site is not legally responsible for the content and the site’s administrators did not respond to a request for comment.
A video shared with Guardian Australia shows one employer offering an applicant for a dish-washing position at a restaurant a wage of $14 an hour.
In Australia, the fair work ombudsman sets the minimum wage. As of 1 July 2020 the absolute minimum wage was $19.84, or $753.80 a week, though the exact minimums change depending on industry and how a worker is classified.
According to the ombudsman’s wage calculator, a person aged 20 years or older working as a casual in the hospitality industry should earn about $25 an hour.
When the applicant in the video, which was recorded in January this year, asks why the figure they were given is so low, the employer answers: “We have our ways.”
In other text message chains shared with Guardian Australia, applicants for jobs were offered wages between $10 and $11 an hour, though some were as low as $5 an hour.
Jacky Chen and Dante Ding, who run a group on the messenger app WeChat for people to share information about dodgy employers, say this is because employers will tell the Australian Tax Office that an employee is working a certain amount of hours at the correct wage.
In reality they may be working twice as long, meaning their real wage is half.
Chen and Ding started the group earlier this year when they asked people to report businesses in South Australia paying less than $15 an hour. Since then they have allegedly received reports of more than 40 business ripping off workers.
“It is something everyone knows about but no one really talks about,” Ding said. “We targeted $15 an hour. We want that to no longer be possible. There are other businesses, but if they pay $16 an hour we don’t know about them.”
They connected Naomi to the Working Women’s Centre, which is now representing her in her planned case against her former employer.
The organisation’s director, Abbey Kendall, says Naomi’s is not the only case her organisation is managing and that the situation for international students is dire.
“For international students, they’re living in another world when it comes to work,” Kendall said. “If you are an international student you are lucky to get the minimum wage in Adelaide.
If you are an international student you are lucky to get the minimum wage
“Usually we think about labour markets as being our normal industrial relations system and black markets, where people do cash-in-hand or work off the books. These international students exist in a labour market that sits outside our industrial relations system.
“This is farm-to-table. It happens on the farms up through to the restaurants, to the cleaning services. And it’s not just South Australia. It’s everywhere.”
For years the Guardian has buried wage theft and falling wages under a race-obsessed viewpoint to support mass immigration as MB has tried desperately to put it on the agenda.
Read it and weep, fake left. This is your useful idiocy exposed.
That said, bring on more of this. Although the issue is allowed in the Guardian today only because it has a race element, the problems it causes are much broader. This is also the kernel of weak wages growth for everybody.
You cannot run mass immigration into an economy with a large output gap (that is, too much supply) without it happening. No amount of policing will prevent it. As the article says, there are myriad scams and they are everywhere, driven by a permanent labour force supply shock as cheap foreign bodies flow in. This is made worse by the importation of unscrupulous practices from foreign lands (which is not to say that there isn’t a plentiful supply of unscrupulous local capital). Penalties are just the cost of doing business.
It is not a quirk of the system, it is the system. And if the Coalition is allowed to reboot it into vast post-COVID economic slack then it will intensify beyond belief.
If you want to stop the wage theft and falling wages then stop the immigration. Cut foreign students. Cut temporary workers. Cut permanent migrants to 80k for critical skills only.
Nothing else will do it.
