Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to give a quick shout-out to my good friend the member for Indi's school that is visiting: the Catholic College Wodonga. Welcome to parliament. We have a Catholic school in Bendigo in my electorate, and they are good friends and fantastic every time they visit. I am sure you will have lots of questions and challenges for the member for Indi, so welcome to Canberra. It is probably fitting that you are here for this bill, because a lot of young people find themselves in precarious employment and today, unfortunately, are in fact vulnerable workers.

As I stand up and speak about this bill, I find myself disappointed. It is good to see the government finally doing something on vulnerable workers. It is good to see that they are catching up to Labor and to community expectations. After years and years of reports, media reports, Senate inquiries and their own investigations by Fair Work Australia, we finally have something on vulnerable workers. But, in an opportunity to stand here and say that we are doing something to protect people who have been exploited, instead they stand up and spend their speaking time bashing unions. That is so disappointing because our contributions on this bill should be acknowledging the work that is done by unions to help expose the seedy underbelly of what is happening in a lot of these workplaces. Unions have worked with media and the Fair Work Ombudsman to help expose the exploitation in our agricultural industry, in our cleaning industry and in our property services industries and have helped expose the exploitation that is occurring in a lot of our meatworks and processing. That is just four industries where we know that vulnerable workers are being mistreated.

The extent of the mistreatment ranges from not being paid properly, being underpaid or not receiving award entitlements to the very other end, which is bordering on modern slavery, where people who are temporary workers here are having their passports confiscated. They are being locked into places, being forced to board 20 people to a house and are charged exorbitant rates. There are cases of sexual assault and sexual harassment. That is the very extreme end of what is essentially a worker issue.

This bill is a start. It starts to address some of the exploitation issues occurring across our economy and in our community. Labor supports its passage through the parliament, because it is about time we started to do something. On a daily basis we have reports about what is going on. I acknowledge that in the last week it has probably been every couple of days; with our Fairfax journalists taking industrial action, we have lost a few of our investigative journalists helping to expose what is going on. I acknowledge that they are back at work today.

I also acknowledge that the government has not called any Fairfax journalists criminals for taking unprotected industrial action. They said that, if a childcare worker took unprotected industrial action, they were putting the lives of the children at risk and they would be sent nasty letters. If they are a construction worker who walked onto a site and said we need to stop work because my late has just fallen down with an almost fatal injury, they get sent show-cause notices from the ABCC, and this government stands up and calls those people criminals. Those people are facing criminal fines. They are very quick to demonise every other worker that stands up for their rights. Perhaps their treatment of our friends at Fairfax is turning over a new leaf—but, as we have seen in these contributions, it is not. Maybe they just fear journalists more than they fear early-childhood educators.

This bill, as I said, falls significantly short of Labor's policy that we took to the last election and what we announced 12 months ago. Before this government even turned its mind to protecting workers, we were out there with workers, with organisations saying, 'Something needs to be done.' This bill does not combat sham contracting, the licensing of labour hire companies or the shutting down of companies phoenixing to avoid wage liabilities. It does not reform the Fair Work Act to strengthen the protections for workers and those who seek to represent them. It does not criminalise employers involved in conduct used to coerce or threaten during the commission of serious contraventions of the Fair Work Act, particularly in relation to temporary overseas workers. And it also fails to make it easier for workers to recover unpaid wages from an employer or directors responsible for these companies.

This is the problem with this government: it does something it calls 'protecting vulnerable workers' and hopes that nobody notices it does not quite complete the job. But we need to look at the impact of labour hire and what is happening in our workplaces, particularly ag and food processing. In my own electorate, and this is quite common in regional Australia, we have a chicken processor who uses a significant component of labour hire. I have met with several of those workers. They have in some cases worked very long hours, up to 24 hours. They did not know when they were going to finish. They are paid cash in hand. One woman fell while she was there, miscarried and had no support. I do acknowledge that the Fair Work Ombudsman has been involved and has said that it is working with the company to help clean up these practices. But it took a lot of media and some very brave and bold individuals to speak up to get action. People should not have to fight so hard to get their basic entitlements. This particular factory is also happening up the road in Kyneton at Hardwicks. Almost on a weekly basis I am sent images out of overcrowded streets, lots of cars, lots of people being crammed into boarding houses that are owned by people who work at the facility.

These backpackers are being employed to work in meatworks and are being paid the award—not the collective agreement rate, the award. In some cases they are not even being paid the award. It is putting downward pressure on the labour market. If we do not clean this up, if we do not support people and ensure they get paid properly, if there is a cheap source of backdoor labour, what happens is it puts pressure on those who are working next them being paid the correct entitlements. This is what is happening with a lot of foreign workers, temporary workers and guest workers in our country. Welcome to Australia and be exploited.

We have seen exploitation in some very high profile cases. Take the case of Australia Post. International students were basically being coerced into working above the maximum 20 hours that they can do. Again, we had to work way too hard to have this investigated. These are not the only group of international students who are being mistreated. We have seen the case of 7-Eleven. We have seen the case of Caltex. Three other cases involves predominantly international students who are supposed to be here for study but find they have very little time to study because their employer is making them work longer and holds the threat of their visas over their heads. One of the things the government could have done in this bill is go after employers who bully people and say, 'Unless you do this, I will report you and have you deported.' The bill also does not have any whistleblower protections for people who speak up, meaning that it is going to be very hard to get people to speak up to help address many of these issues.

In the case of 7-Eleven, we saw the business model that was created to systematically exploit vulnerable foreign workers. We all remember the footage of someone being paid right into their bank account and then forced to go to the ATM to take the money out to give back to their boss. There is a fundamental problem with the structure of that business if it can only be sustained by exploiting foreign workers and stealing their wages.

Myer is another really disappointing one. Myer have said, 'It's not our problem.' Two decades ago they used to directly employ their cleaners. Their cleaners were known; they were part of the family—part of their staff. Then they outsourced the work to cleaning companies. Today, the cleaning company is engaged in a complex network of sham contracting. The workers who ended up doing the work—as we found out in another union investigation, working with local media—were not being paid award wages. They were denied penalty rates and superannuation and they were working without decent occupational health and safety protections. We are not just talking about recently arrived migrants but people in regional areas, like Bendigo and Ballarat, who took the job because they needed a job, knowing full well that they were being exploited and underpaid. Yet Myer have said: 'It's not our problem. Take it up with the contractor.' That is, quite frankly, not good enough. When we have multinationals and major businesses in Australia saying, 'I am not responsible,' we need to take responsibility and reform the Fair Work Act to protect vulnerable workers.

Then there are the Pizza Hut delivery drivers—and if it is Pizza Hut it is probably a lot of others—and supply chains like Baiada, another chicken group in South Australia. There is exploitation in their plants of temporary overseas workers—workers being forced to work dangerously long hours for far less than the minimum wage. Despite the efforts of the Fair Work Ombudsman and the dollars and time that have been spent to investigate this particular industry and this particular company, we are still not seeing significant reform. This is just the tip of the iceberg that is the exploitation going on in our economy. It is widespread. There is undercutting of the minimum wage. There are more and more people being forced to take up jobs that, quite frankly, are cases of exploitation.

Penalty rates are another issue that we are debating. Previous speakers have highlighted what is going on in hotels and with some collective agreements. One of the points they fundamentally miss every time they talk about penalty rates—take Crown casino—is that every hour of the day that they work they are paid the same rate—Sunday, Monday and through the week. It is a rolled-up rate. It is a really high rate of pay. When you compare their roster, they pass the better off overall test. These workers are some of the best paid hospitality workers in the country. Security guards at Melbourne Airport are the same; they are paid a rolled-up rate. They have negotiated a rolled-up rate. As a result, with what they earn over the year of the agreement, with the averaging out, they are much better off overall, moving off minimum rates of pay of about $40,000 a year into salaries of $50,000 to $60,000 a year depending on how much overtime they have. That is what happens when we have a genuine and fair collective bargaining scheme. The government chooses to look just at the Sunday rate and not at all the other conditions that have been agreed. Instead, what we have is more union bashing—bashing of the very people who have gone into these situations to help expose them, to talk to people who are not members of their union to find out about the appalling conditions they are living and working in and how they are being treated by their employer.

What is happening is disgraceful. It should be a national shame. It is a stain on our good reputation, here and overseas, the way some workers are being treated, particularly recently arrived migrants and temporary workers, international students, backpackers, people who are here on 457 visas and people who are here as part of our aid program or our seasonal worker program. Too many of them are victims of exploitation. This bill is a start but it does not go far enough to close the loopholes, clean up the act and hold accountable the employers and the clients at the centre of this. If we want to be a country with high wages and good, secure jobs, we have to start with the fundamental of ensuring that every single worker is paid properly.

The Australian Jobs Embassy is back—a demonstration of how this government has failed their own election mantra around jobs and growth. The Australian Jobs Embassy is back, and these are some of the issues that they are looking at: a company's ability to terminate agreements, companies using labour-hire terms that exploit workers and the fact that this government has no plan to create decent, secure jobs. After all the commentary in the media, all of the research work done by all of the not-for-profits and all of the work done by their own agencies—for example, the Fair Work Ombudsman and the Fair Work Commission—and all the different agencies, we expected more to be in this bill. This government should accept Labor's amendment, because at least that will address the issue of protecting penalty rates and take-home pay. But, quite frankly, the government must do better.

See this speech in context