The hospitality and tourism industries continue to beg the federal government for access to cheap migrant workers, claiming they are facing the biggest labour shortages in decades. The article, published without question by the ABC, claims:
- Restaurants are being forced to slash opening hours because they cannot find suitable staff.
- The Queensland Tourism Industry Council “is calling for skilled migrants to be allowed back into the country”.
- Cairns restaurateur Craig Squire claims “the best fix for this region would be to get 1,200 to 1,500 international students back into Cairns”.
- Restaurateur Angelica Jolly wants “some resolution to the visa crisis”.
- The aren’t enough apprentices to meet demand.
Not once did the ABC bother to ask the simplest question: have the hospitality and tourism industries tried filling labour shortages by offering better wages and conditions, as well as providing training?
Even ‘Big Australia’ immigration champion, Michael Pascoe, can see through the industries’ special pleading:
The nation’s employers are publicly performing a fine impression of a bunch of school kids standing on the edge of a pool for a swimming lesson in cooler months.
For employers, it’s not the temperature they’re complaining about, but labour shortages.
It’s not mummy they want to save them from the plunge, but the Morrison government by re-opening the immigration gates…
The hospitality industry stories were much the same as a conversation I had on Tuesday night with the manager of a thriving Sunshine Coast restaurant.
Yes, it was very hard to get staff. Some places were only opening five nights or less because of the labour shortage, people were putting in long hours, there weren’t the backpackers, the student visas.
So had the restaurant increased its pay rates, was it paying more to entice staff from other establishments?
Err, no…
For a 40-hour week, 48-week year, about $50,000 before tax. Australia’s median wage is 20 per cent higher, average ordinary time earnings for full-time adults is nearly 80 per cent higher.
Meanwhile, The Australian’s Robert Gottliebsen acknowledged that the sharp decline in international students due to the pandemic has been a major driver of jobs growth and falling unemployment, as it has required sectors such as hospitality to employ Australians at the standard award rate rather than continuing to rely on low-cost overseas student labour.
Gottliebsen argues that younger Australians who were previously among the long-term unemployed are among those to have benefited from the jobs boom. The shift to hiring local workers has in turn significantly reduced the cash economy, which used to be rife in the hospitality sector:
At the peak Australia had more than 700,000 overseas students…
Now many capital and regional city hotels, restaurants, cafes etc are struggling to find labour because the overseas student supply has substantially reduced the pool…
Those venues that used low cost overseas student labour and are surviving must pay the standard award rate on local labour.
There is anecdotal evidence that in many areas the young Australians who are emerging in these cafes and restaurants are very grateful for being able to leave long-term unemployment…
Overall this is wonderful news for the people involved, plus for the society and the economy.
Early last year, a group of academics from the University of Queensland penned an article in The Conversation dissecting the “institutionalised worker exploitation” across the Australian restaurant industry:
Since mid-2018 we’ve interviewed 180 culinary students, apprentice chefs and mature chefs as part of an ongoing study into mental health and wellbeing in the hospitality industry.
What they’ve told us confirms worker exploitation is institutionalised…
What we’ve found isn’t just that wage theft is rife. What’s notable is that it is less like burglary and more like daylight robbery. Most staff know they are being paid less than what they are entitled to but accept it as “the norm”.
This institutionalised exploitation, according to the researchers, has contributed “to poor mental health among hospitality workers” and is “contributing to workers quitting the industry” and “rising traineeship incompletion rates”.
Let’s get back to basics here. The primary reason why the hospitality and tourism industries are struggling to attract local workers is because they pay the lowest wages in the nation by a very big margin:
The Accommodation & Food Services industry pays the lowest wages in Australia.
They have gotten away with this by exploiting migrants, such as foreign students and backpackers. Now the supply of cheap migrant labour has dried up, they are being forced to confront the poor wages and conditions across the industry. And they don’t like it one bit.
The only shortages the hospitality and tourism industries are experiencing are credibility, integrity, and the willingness to pay a living wage.
Giving these industries greater access to migrant workers would keep wages depressed, deprive Australians of job opportunities, and exacerbate the migrant wage theft that is already endemic.
