9/4/2020
'It's everywhere': the foreign students exposing Australia's wage theft epidemic | Australia news | The Guardian
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.
“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.”
According to modelling more than $200m is lost by employees to
wage theft each year. Photograph: Dan Peled/AAP
Though it is difficult to find specific figures, Edward Cavanough, manager of policy at the
McKell Institute, says the situation for international students and those on working on holiday
visas is dire – especially with the pandemic.
With the federal government refusing to extend any support, many are stuck in limbo.
Being paid so little at a time of high unemployment means many cannot return home, even as
they have to keep working to service the large personal loans that were required to travel to
Australia to access education in the first place.
“International students are taken advantage of because of the stringent visa conditions and the
power balance between them and their employee,” Cavanough says. “Often international
students don’t even get given the correct information that explains their rights at work.
“This is bad for a range of reasons. It undercuts the businesses doing the right thing. It impacts
revenue when you have people doing it off the books. And then it impacts the economy,
because you have these international students who don’t have the money in their back pocket
to pay for things.”
Though there are no specific figures to quantify how exposed international students are to
wage theft, Cavanough’s modelling suggests $270m is lost each year.
This figure was achieved by working back through the 23 fair work ombudsman audit
campaigns carried out in South Australia to check the books of 1,700 business.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/sep/03/its-everywhere-the-foreign-students-exposing-australias-wage-theft-epidemic
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