Who would have thought? The reduced access to migrant workers has driven farm wages up, with the agricultural industry needing to offer higher pay to attract local workers:
Critical labour shortages are forcing Queensland farmers to pay higher wages and provide better conditions to attract local workers…
Bundaberg lychee grower Craig van Rooyen said the coronavirus pandemic had forced him to rely on almost 100 locals to get fruit picked and packed.
“It’s mostly a local workforce for the first time,” he said.
“We used mainly backpackers in the past, but because of coronavirus that has made it more difficult”…
“It’s really time for growers to go and assess their business model and see if they can create more positions that go for a longer term [and] certainly more permanent options on the table,” [The managing director of Bundaberg Fruit and Vegetable Growers, Bree Grima, said] said.
“If growers want to retain a local workforce they need to place incentives for them on the farm.”
As Joanna Howe – Associate Professor at the University of Adelaide Law School – noted last week, visa reforms by the Howard Government that gave farmers easy access to migrant workers “completely changed the nature of the workforce” by pushing Australians out of these jobs and ushering the exploitation and wage theft 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”…
The fact is that many Australian farms have refused to employ local workers because they have to be paid a legal wage and are far less easy to exploit.
Let’s add this, at the AFR:
Gig economy workers such as Uber Eats delivery riders will be entitled to a minimum wage and other basic terms and conditions under a policy proposal to be released soon by federal Labor.
…Shadow industrial relations minister Tony Burke told The Australian Financial Review the definition was being abused by gig economy companies.
He said being an independent contractor was supposed to give a worker greater independence, not lock them into “earning less than Australia’s minimum wage”.
“An owner-driver of a heavy vehicle with a mortgage who leverages equity against that vehicle and employs a bookkeeper is clearly an independent contractor,” he said.
“There’s no way you can put a visa worker who delivers pizza on a second-hand bike in the same category.”
Will this achieve much aside from making your uber deliveries more expensive? It might help broader wages at the margin but the real problem is the visa worker in the first place not their role in gig work.
Gig reform is a welcome minor measure but if there is an endless supply shock in the labour market then that will still weigh on wages anyway. Labor’s attack on temporary visas is, therefore, a better measure to lift wages if it shows teeth, rather than simply morphing into higher permanent migration flows.
The example of farms tells the tale. 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.
Australia’s farm sector coped just fine pre-2000 before the migrant slave labour tap was turned on. It’s time to that it went ‘back to the future’.