This legislation looks pretty good:
Employers who deliberately underpay workers could be jailed for up to 10 years and fined $7.8 million under proposed new federal wage theft laws, while much larger fines will be levelled on businesses who engage in large-scale underpayment of their staff.
…The draft laws, to be introduced to the parliament by Employment Minister Tony Burke on Monday, will create a new federal offence for wage theft which targets deliberate wrongdoing by businesses, and not those who make honest mistakes, or self-report and take reasonable steps to repay the correct wages.
What’s with the excuses? Wage theft is theft. Punish it.
The stealing of wages became a plague in the pre-COVID economic cycle. As mass immigration boomed in a loose labour market and vulnerable migrants were especially exploited, often by migrants from the same country with very different cultural normatives, the microeconomics of the labour market devolved.
Wage theft disappeared during COVID as borders shut and the labour market tightened. But it has reappeared with Albo’s recent quantitative peopling, not least the waves of Indian “untouchables” ripe for enslavement. Another case appeared just today:
Cleaning services giant Spotless is facing a criminal prosecution for allegedly failing to pay $17,000 in long service leave under strict state laws.
Whether Labor succeeds in stamping out wage theft is an open question.
So far, it has shown zero policy courage. Based on the Albo “consensus” modus operandi to date, there will be carve-outs and new loopholes as the business lobbies are placated. To wit:
Employment Minister Tony Burke has failed to win over big business to its crackdown on labour hire despite offering some concessions and the two sides remain at loggerheads over how many workers will be captured by “same job, same pay” laws.
Mr Burke says only 67,000 labour hire workers, concentrated in mining and aviation, will be affected by the changes, as he confirms union officials will gain new right-of-entry powers to demand payroll records to investigate underpayments.
Moreover, enforcement will be the key, and we already know how inadequate Fair Work is.
More broadly, this points to a trend that Albo’s fake left Labor has rather stupidly zigged when it should have zagged. BofA:
Zeitgeist: net 44% of Americans now support labor unions, highest since‘72 (Chart7); policies of fiscal excess, redistribution, protection is aiding recovery in labor share of GDP from secular low of in 2010s (andAI = UBI if robots replace humans en mass):
The same sentiment was ready to support a steady centre-left government in Australia.
Instead, it got Albo’s useful idiots of the right.
