The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The Labour Albanese government’s election was supposed to result in significant change and improved worker prospects.
Before the election, Albo’s fake left repeatedly claimed it wanted a lower migrant intake to stop wage pressures, promised legislation to prevent wage theft and a raft of new policies to boost take-home pay.
After the election Albo’s fale left mega-spiked the migrant intake, smashed putative wage growth and crushed take-home pay.
Now, a new boom is underway. Adele Ferguson is one of the last fair dinkum journalists in Australia:
Bubble tea giant Chatime and its managing director will be bracing for the tone and size of penalties ordered by the Federal Circuit Court later this week, as wage theft and other forms of worker exploitation continue to engulf the nation.
The orders will land the day before Anna Booth takes over as the new head of the workplace regulator, the Fair Work Ombudsman, amid a slowing economy and mounting pressure on companies to keep a lid on costs including wages.
Whether it is wage theft, outdated enterprise agreements, or traineeships subsidised by the government, an ominous cloud has hung over the country’s labour force for years.
In some cases, worker underpayment has been blamed on a payroll error or failures in administration. In recent years, it has embroiled some of the country’s most well-known organisations, including Woolworths, Qantas, and the ABC, to name a few.
But in too many cases, employers have been allowed to build empires on the backs of worker exploitation. Some organisations are mercilessly exploiting some of the country’s most vulnerable workers.
In any month the Fair Work Ombudsman’s website is littered with legal actions and enforceable undertakings or fines for businesses underpaying workers.
In the past week alone, it has taken legal action against a daycare centre in Newcastle, the former operators of a greengrocer in Melbourne’s east, a cafe in Sydney’s inner west, secured a penalty in court against the former operator of a vehicle repair and detailing business in Adelaide, secured $72,800 in penalties in court against the operators of an Italian restaurant in Melbourne, and a $13,786 penalty in court against the operator of a Melbourne-based bricklaying company.
Indeed in a recent speech, Kristen Hannah, the acting Fair Work Ombudsman, revealed that last year the regulator received more than 14,000 anonymous reports of workplace compliance issues — a 12 per cent increase on the year before.
She said Fair Work clawed back more than $500 million in underpayment to 250,000 workers, compared with $532 million the previous year, with university payments continuing to comprise a large amount of the recoveries.
“Over the last year, we have accepted more Enforceable Undertakings including from David Jones, Politix, Crown Melbourne and Perth, Suncorp, RSL Life Care Limited, Uniting AgeWell, and Apollo Health. We also commenced litigation against Super Retail Group and its subsidiaries Super Cheap Auto, Rebel Sport, SRG Leisure Retail (BCF and Ray’s Outdoors), and Macpac Retail,” she said.
But many underpayment scandals aren’t self-reported and workers are too scared to speak up.
And on it goes. Wage theft is not a bug in the mass immigration system; it is the key feature of it.
It exploded in the last cycle as mass immigration flooded the labour market with unprecedented numbers of unskilled and vulnerable workers.
This forced a structural change in microeconomic industrial relations. Labour in Australia’s least-skilled industries was transformed from a cost to a profit centre as a visa leading to residency substituted for pay. Some even paid their bosses to work.
In a labour force in which a visa is a wage and income a fringe benefit, businesses getting busted for ripping off workers is just the cost of doing business. This is because there is no business without the theft. The change to foreign slave labour in affected industries is structural. If they raise wages, they will be unable to compete.
Which is precisely what should happen. The system is geared towards lowering living standards for Australians. It de-automates, drives disproductivity, capital shallowing and shrinks incomes for all but the slave driver.
Fair Work is not a regulator; it is a fig leaf. The Albanese government is neither left, nor for workers.
It is the same slave-driving corporate whore that came before it.
