However, the Australian Workers Union’s (AWU) national secretary, Daniel Walton, has taken an opposing view today saying practices such as wage theft and exploitation are “entrenched and normalised” in the nation’s horticulture industry.
The AWU and a number of other unions want the federal government to hold a royal commission into worker exploitation in the fruit and vegetable industry:
“If we want to change this we need to shine the brightest possible spotlight on the dark corners of the industry and that’s why we need a royal commission”…
[A Chinese] worker, who did not want to be identified, said most workers were paid $8 to $10 an hour on average but some received as little as $3 an hour…
“There are so many people from China here who have been tricked into working on farms and now they’re basically trapped… What I have been through I would never think could happen in a civilised country like Australia. In a country with democracy and human rights like Australia, it should not happen”.
Over the past six months, The New Daily has published a series of investigative reports (here, here , here and here) showing that thousands of Australians have been rejected for farm work because they are required to be paid legal wages and are less easy to exploit than migrant workers.
These anecdotal reports were then backed-up by official data from the Department of Education, Skills and Employment (DESE), which showed that 10,500 Australian job seekers found fruit picking jobs in the last six months. However, an additional 3,500 who were fit and prepared to do the work applied for work but were rejected, which is at odds with claims by farmers that they were desperate for workers.
As Associate Professor Joanna Howe noted last month, visa reforms by the Howard Government giving farmers easier access to migrant workers “completely changed the nature of the workforce” by pushing Australian workers out and facilitating the wage theft and exploitation now so prevalent across the industry:
“Over the last two decades, the Howard government visa extensions for backpackers who work in horticulture and the seasonal worker program for Pacific Island workers completely changed the nature of the workforce”…
“That prompted the Australians who worked in the industry, including grey nomads, school leavers and long-term horticulture workers to leave and find other work”…
“Horticulture is an industry where there’s non-compliance with Labour standards… which skews the labour market downwards”…
“If the labour standards were enforced, you would see more Australians [back] in the industry”…
Allowing Australia’s farmers to continuously recruit cheap foreign workers en masse is bad for both wages and long-run productivity.
Without foreign labour, higher wages will drive automation and lift productivity, boosting both profits and wages over the longer-term.
There’s a reason why farms in advanced nations are more likely to involve a handful of workers operating heavy machinery, whereas in low-wage developing countries farms are manned by many workers doing manual labour.
One wonders how Australia survived (not starved) for so many generations before the industry was corrupted by greedy labour hire companies abusing temporary migrants with poor wages and working conditions?
The whole horticultural industry needs a clean-out, not support from the federal government.
The AWU’s call for a Royal Commission is a good place to start.
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness.
Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.
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