This week we witnessed Australia’s hospitality industry lobby the federal government to give it greater access to migrant workers.
It began when Restaurant and Catering Industry Association of Australia (R&CA) chief executive Wes Lambert was quoted in The AFR supporting the government-led Joint Standing Committee on Migration’s recommendations to allow Australian businesses easy access to cheap migrant labour.
Lambert claimed the reforms would help the hospitality industry overcome skills shortages:
“The interim recommendations in the report set out a vision for the hospitality sector to help them get the skilled workers they need to keep tens of thousands of Australian workers in jobs.”
“R&CA strongly believes that skilled migration should not become a political football and called upon all parties in the Parliament to support the interim report’s recommendations.”
The ABC also ran a story on Darwin hospitality businesses, which claimed they were facing “acute” skills shortages and desperately needed access to migrant workers. They also want Australian taxpayers to subsidise quarantine costs for migrant workers:
Also suffering are the owners of Moorish Cafe, Gertrude Knight and Marc Wagnon…
They are calling for migration initiatives to bring workers to the NT, such as covering quarantine costs…
The Home Affairs Department has said while hospitality workers are included in the skilled migration program, they are not on the priority list of 18 occupations in the pandemic, nor are quarantine fees covered.
NT Department of Industry, Tourism and Trade; NT Tourism and Hospitality Minister Natasha Fyles, and small Business Minister Paul Kirby were also asked if quarantine costs could be covered by the NT government, but all failed to answer that question.
The notion of bringing migrant workers into Australia to work in hospitality to alleviate so-called ‘skills shortages’ is ridiculous. The actual evidence shows that the industry is rife with surplus labour.
First, the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ (ABS) quarterly employment data shows that the Accommodation & Food Services industry (i.e. hospitality & tourism) has lost 86,200 workers in the year to February 2021:
Hospitality jobs are way below pre-COVID levels.
Second, the number of job postings across Hospitality & Tourism was 40% below pre-COVID levels, despite the 33% increase in job postings across the broader Australian labour market:
Hospitality & tourism jobs are down 40% from pre-COVID levels.
Third, annual wage growth across the Accommodation & Food Services industry crashed to only 0.3% in the year to December 2020, which was by far the lowest recorded wage growth across Australia:
Wage growth across the Accommodation & Food Services industry has crashed and was the lowest in Australia in 2020.
Finally, the median earnings across the Accommodation & Food Services industry was by far the lowest in Australia in August 2020 (as well as August 2015) at only $650 per week, according to the ABS:
The Accommodation & Food Services industry provides the lowest pay in Australia.
Seriously, how can anybody take the claims that the hospitality industry is facing skills shortages seriously? If that was true, the industry would not have experienced mass unemployment, the lowest wage growth in Australia, as well as paying the lowest wages in Australia.
The truth is the hospitality industry operates on a model of widespread wage theft and exploitation of migrant workers (see here and here). Giving it easier access to foreign workers would merely exacerbate the exploitation, push wages even lower, and rob local workers of employment opportunities.
