Reporting Exploited Labour in #Ballarat

From The Courier

Ballarat workers paid $6 an hour

By Alex Hamer
Feb. 23, 2016, 10:29 a.m.

Ballarat Trades and Labour Council secretary Brett Edgington.

Mr Edgington, the first witness at the Ballarat hearing, said people were badly treated and underpaid across several industries. Ballarat Trades and Labour Council secretary Brett Edgington has used the Victorian government’s labour hire and insecure work inquiry to make explosive claims about the local treatment of workers. 

“You’ve got underpayment, where a worker is paid  cash-in-hand between six and 10 dollars an hour, and there’s no tax, no super,” he said. 

“This is at crisis point and rampant. A very significant number of businesses in hospitality, retail, the domestic building industry (are underpaying workers).”  

 “A lot of the schemes we’ve discovered are not just oversights by the employer.” 

The inquiry, which is visiting regional cities after Melbourne hearings, will continue all day, including workers themselves. 

Mr Edgington said a The Courier article in December had spurred on many young workers to come and see him to raise issues of underpayment and poor treatment, with people coming “almost every day”. 

He also said the problem was “worse” in Ballarat and other regional centres than in Melbourne because employers could blacklist workers from whole industries.

Workplace exploitation of varying degrees in Australia - and how workers are becoming more vulnerable day by day.

Picture above is from here

Mark Zirnsak is Victorian and Tasmanian social justice spokesman, Uniting Church; Heather Moore is national policy and advocacy co-ordinator, The Freedom Partnership – End Modern Slavery, The Salvation Army.

Mark and Heather have written a most enlightening article for The Age.  People not involved in employee organisations might be surprised at how often even otherwise good employers might end up in breach of award wages and conditions - which form part of the industrial laws of Australia.  The employers referred to are otherwise good employers who have not set out to defraud or exploit their employees.

Then there are the careless employers.  These are the ones who are ill-informed, ill-educated perhaps who don't try to bring their standards up to anywhere near professional.  They probably would not know what an award was if it bit them in their painful parts.  Their employees are probably offered cash in hand instead of penalty rates and as for a time and wages record - what's that and why bother!

Then there are the third group of employers.  The ones who deliberately set out to defraud and exploit working people.  The proliferation of labour hire companies in modern Australia has made it very easy for fraudsters and exploiters to multiply to the detriment of human society.  In modern Australia, human trafficking continues across a wide number of industries - and in a manner not seen until recently.  Go here to find a number of posts relating to the revelations of human trafficking and exploitation in agriculture in Australia made public last year on ABC's Four Corners. 2015 saw the revelations relating to oppression in the 7-Eleven petrol/convenience store chain.

As Adele Ferguson points out in her article:

With 1.3 million workers in Australia on visas, equivalent to one in 10 of the workforce, it has wider economic implications. Besides undermining the award system, it is potentially robbing the Australian Taxation Office of hundreds of millions of dollars a year in tax.

Please note the last sentence because at this point in time the Turnbull Government is indulging in all sorts of cost cutting which will impact widely the most vulnerable Australians.

More could be said of sex slavery in Australia; and of poor Occupational Health & Safety training and conditions which result in severe injuries and even death across many industries; and of the regular exploitation of the 457 system by some employers. 457s are the regulations which allow employers to bring to Australia foreign workers.

Australia has relied strongly over the last century on trade unions and trade union membership to look after the exploited.  However, as Australia enters the 21st Century, union membership and participation has declined and the political situation is such that conservative governments try their best to undermine the union movement. A middle-class Labor movement has not helped the situation either.

So if union power and influence declines and governments will not provide appropriate levels of resources for government instrumentalities who have the purview of a variety of workplace practices, then workplace ethics and practices overall will be at best 'iffy' and at worst a form of slavery ... and there will be widespread exploitation in between these extremes. 

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/workplace-relations/worker-exploitation-destroys-the-economy-20151001-gjz2sn.html#ixzz3wvRCIfso 
Follow us: @smh on Twitter | sydneymorningherald on Facebook

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/comment/worker-exploitation-head-20160109-gm2fgq.html#ixzz3wvM3koS7 

Follow us: @theage on Twitter | theageAustralia on Facebook

Letting migrant workers know what rights they have.

The article below comes from Lapidomedia - Centre for Religious Literacy in World Affairs. 
While Australia does not have the huge numbers of migrant workers reported in this article, it does have migrant workers and, on many occasions, they have been exploited.  Wouldn't it be good if something similar to this could be provided to them.

~~~~~

Teaching migrant workers their rights: good news from the Gulf

by Jayson Casper - 3rd July 2015

Odeh (right): ‘Unleashing migrants' skills’. Photo: NYUAD

MIGRANT workers long abandoned to slave-like conditions in the Arabian Gulf have found an unlikely weapon in their fight against exploitation: hackers.

Young Arab computer geeks are creatively helping vulnerable foreign labourers break into a culture that either ignores or abuses them.

Last April New York University Abu Dhabi hosted the fourth annualHackathon for Social Good in the Arab World at their campus in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

More than 150 top university students from seventeen countries competed to design practical apps to innovate solutions for social problems, during a three-day marathon.

An app called Guide Me won the Audience Choice Award, aiming to inform migrants of their rights in law.  It also monitors abuse.

26-year-old Mona Demaidi, a mentor from Palestine and a lead programmer for the app is a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester in the UK. ‘Our region needs transparency,’ she told Lapido Media. ‘This project will give data and facts, as we don’t have access to information. And here, it will change lives.’
 

Mona Demaidi (right): ‘We need the facts’. Photo: NYUAD

With a team of eight students she helped create a system to log calls to a central database from a free helpline to record and track complaints about abuse.

All audio, it will operate in twelve different languages, providing labour law and feedback options for anonymous or on-the-record complaints.

Information is also available on a website, to be accessed from a kiosk at every labour camp.

‘We’re not coming from the West dictating what the problem is and what the solution should be,’ said Sana Odeh, the NYU professor and organizing force. ‘These must come from the students. The power of a hackathon is to unleash students' skills and connect them to the world.’

And though the younger generation is different, there is a significant gap to overcome.

‘We always want to hide our problems, we don’t want to talk about them,’ Demaidi said. ‘But the information collected will be good for the workers, good for the companies, and good for the government.’

According to the Pew Research Center, the Arabian Gulf is home to fifteen million migrant workers, the majority from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

In the UAE they make up 84 per cent of the population, the highest rate in the world. Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain follow next on the list.

Revd Andrew Thompson: ‘Honouring’. Photo: Jayson Casper

One link between these workers, the Hackathon, and the government is Anglican priest Revd Andrew Thompson of St Andrew’s Church, Abu Dhabi.

‘The nation has good laws,’ the British vicar who has served in the region for the past 27 years, told Lapido. ‘We just want to assist the government in letting the workers know what they are.' 

St Andrew's Church compound is part of the Anglican Diocese of Cyprus and the Gulf.  Thompson hosts and oversees an international community of more than ten thousand weekly worshippers, in 45 congregations with 17 language groups.  

Thanks to those like Thompson and his teams of volunteers, they now have the law translated into twelve different languages.

Instead of lambasting local negligence, as much of the media do - even Migrants' Rights complain this is counter-productive - Thompson believes in supplementing it.

‘Once you shame an Arab you lose him for life,’ said Thompson. ‘We want to honour all that is right and good, and fill in the gaps where the government isn’t working.’

Picked and packed by exploited labour

Australian Unions The temporary visa program is broken and facilitates the gross exploitation of migrant workers, a view confirmed by the Four Corners program that aired last night. Urgent action must be taken by the Federal Government to clamp down and regulate the entire temporary visa and labour hire system and remove rogue operators. There should be an immediate halt to any expansion of the temporary work visa program until the full outcome of the Senate Inquiry is known. National Union of Workers http://www.actu.org.au/actu-media/media-releases/2015/temporary-visa-program-front-for-slave-labour

Wage Theft - defrauding workers in the U.S.A. Workers are supported by Interfaith Worker Justice.

In Australia, we have a system of wage justice which, while it is not perfect, is far away from the experience of many workers in the USA. While the phrase "wage theft" is rarely heard in Australia, many of the actions cited in this video as wage theft do occur in Australia. They are usually dealt with by the Fair Work Commission or the relevant trade union. To find out more about Interfaith Worker Justice, please go here.

Post by Interfaith Worker Justice.

Cross-posted with permission from
Ballarat Interfaith Network's blog,
Beside The Creek.