The Guardian | Cait Kelly
Of the 4,000 migrant workers interviewed, over half were underpaid. Most knew this, but 9 in 10 did nothing. One went to court – but recovered none of their wages. It is not clear that wages claims are being systematically resolved via other legal forums or by the Fair Work Ombudsman, the report said.
The Conversation | Laurie Berg & Bassina Farbenblum
The widespread underpayment of migrant workers in Australia is now well-documented. The vast majority never recover the wages they are owed.
Wage theft is widespread – but very few migrant workers ever recover their wages.
Our report explains why the courts are failing migrant workers and outlines what the government can - and must - do to fix this problem.
THE PIE | Sophie Hogan
A survey examining the degree to which international students are exploited while working in Australia is launching another edition in July.
Today, the Australian parliament passed an important law implementing reforms for which we have been campaigning for years with our allies. The new law decriminalising undocumented workers; confirms that workplace protections apply to all workers regardless of their migration status; strengthens the accountability of employers; and takes the first step towards visa protections for exploited workers.
What is wage theft and why is it systemic for migrant workers? Why don't migrant workers recover unpaid wages? What can governments and business do to reduce risks to workers and make wage claim processes work? Our new short Explainer provides governments, business and advocates with accessible answers to these and other key questions on migrant worker wage theft, based on extensive global research.
Please join the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), Migrant Justice Institute, Solidarity Center, the ILAW Network and MIDEQ for a global discussion on the ways in which unions are successfully supporting migrant workers to achieve labour justice. February 23,: 8:30 – 10.00am Brussels | 3:30-5.00pm Manila | 6:30-8.00pm Sydney
Canberra Times | Sanmati Verma, Bassina Farbenblum, Laurie Berg, Matt Kunkel
“Research conducted by the Migrant Justice Institute in 2018 found that of the 4332 migrant workers surveyed, around three-quarters were paid less than the casual minimum wage, and yet only 9 per cent of underpaid migrants had taken action to recover their wages.
These figures cannot be explained away by visa holders' lack of understanding or workplace literacy. Nor can they be chalked up to bad-apple employers or fraudsters preying on the unsuspecting.
Rather, they are a product of the insecurity and inequality that has been built into the migration regime over years.Advocates for limiting the working holiday program to one year argue the requirement to work in the regions left workers open to exploitation. A survey by the Migrant Justice Institute found that almost half of all working holidaymakers reported being paid well below the minimum wage.”
Join us on December 14, 2022 at 18:00 GMT for a live global webinar with experts and advocates from around the world to discuss progress and opportunities for ensuring that migrant workers can recover the wages they are owed. The webinar will feature the ILO's launch of a new Guidance Note on Wage Protection. Spanish interpretation will be provided.
Join the Migrant Justice Institute for this important conversation with the lawyers, advocates and organisers involved in driving effective reforms. How have promising changes to laws, policies, and government processes come about? What were the conditions that enabled them? And what lessons can be learned for other advocates?
Wage theft is business as usual in many industries that are reliant on migrant workers. Employers know that most unpaid migrant workers will never recover their wages through government and court processes. With the pandemic leaving even more migrant workers unpaid, the need for effective justice mechanisms has never been more urgent.
Migrant Workers’ Access to Justice for Wage Theft, a new report from Migrant Justice Institute Co-Executive Directors Bassina Farbenblum and Laurie Berg, charts a path forward. Pointing to promising examples from around the world, the report illuminates how the barriers that impede migrant workers’ access to justice can be overcome. These innovations shift risks and burdens of wage recovery away from workers and onto government and business, and disrupt employer expectations of impunity.
The report draws on a year of global consultations and analysis across all regions, in partnership with The Solidarity Center and the ILAW Network. It proposes specific, practical reform targets that can underpin global, national and local wage theft campaigns, and support greater coordination among a community of practice working to achieve effective change.
In early April, Prime Minister Scott Morrison sent a clear message to temporary visa holders that if they were no longer financially solvent to ride out the pandemic, they were not welcome in Australia.
As much as it’s lovely to have visitors to Australia in good times, at times like this, if you are a visitor in this country, it is time […] to make your way home.
As our new research published today shows, this statement fuelled feelings of abandonment and worthlessness among temporary visa holders who have been left out of the government’s economic support schemes during the COVID-19 crisis.
In our survey of more than 6,100 temporary visa holders (including international students, backpackers and holiday workers), many used stark, dehumanising language to describe how they’ve felt since the pandemic began in Australia six months ago.
Read more in The Conversation.
Early data from the Temporary Migrant COVID Impact Survey, released today, shows that the financial hardship of temporary migrants is likely to worsen in the coming months. Preliminary analysis from our online survey of over 6,000 temporary migrants in July indicates that over half of the participants (57%) anticipated their financial situation would be somewhat or much worse within six months.
The government’s treatment of temporary visa holders during the crisis also soured many on their experience here. According to our survey, 59% of international students and backpackers were now somewhat or far less likely to recommend Australia as a place for study or a working holiday.
Read our article in The Conversation.
Based on a survey of over 5,000 international students in 2019, the International Students and Wage Theft in Australia report reveals that, despite commitments to improve conditions, the overwhelming majority of international students are still subject to wage theft and poor employment conditions.
Key findings include:
● 77% were paid below the minimum casual hourly wage.
● 32% of Bachelor’s degree students earned just half the minimum casual hourly wage or less ($12/hr or less).
● 26% of all international students earned half the minimum casual hourly wage or less — a figure unchanged since the 2016 National Temporary Migrant Work Survey.
● The overwhelming majority of students who were underpaid knew the minimum wage (86%), but 62% believed they were at fault for the underpayment and had broken the law by accepting below minimum wages.
The report recommends improved labour enforcement and visa protections for international students, as well as improved service provision to address exploitation. Funded by StudyNSW, the Information for Impact Survey was conducted in April and May 2019, and yielded 5,064 valid responses.
MWJI is now conducting a survey about the wellbeing of temporary migrants in Australia during COVID, to document challenges temporary visa-holders have faced in relation to work, housing, health and safety and discrimination.
Please share the survey widely among international students, backpackers, refugees and others on temporary visas to ensure we capture as many voices as possible in this landmark study. Survey closes on 20 July 2020.
Photo by Madalyn Cox on Unsplash
A new article published by Laurie Berg, Bassina Farbenblum, and Angela Kintominas in the Anti-Trafficking Review’s Special Issue – Technology, Anti-Trafficking, and Speculative Futures examines the emergence of digital worker reporting tools within the broader political economy of supply chain governance. As multinational businesses face mounting pressure to identify and address risks of exploitation, trafficking and modern slavery in their supply chains, the article presents three sets of concerns that must be addressed by businesses, investors, donors and governments that develop or utilise these worker reporting tools. First, the quality of data gathered may be inadequate to reliably inform decision-making. Second, global brands may gather large quantities of worker data to identify legal, reputational and financial risks without addressing structural causes of exploitation or delivering outcomes for workers. Third, large scale collection of data from workers creates new risks for workers’ wellbeing and safety.
The Living Precariously report reveals that international students are encountering a minefield of deceptive and exploitative conduct by landlords in Australian housing markets, especially in unregulated share houses where most live.
Key findings include:
Share houses were by far the most common first accommodation for international students (36%).
More than half of international students reported deceptive or illegal conduct by landlords or poor living conditions in their first share house.
Most international students found their share house through unregulated online platforms including Gumtree and Flatmates.com.au (51%). These students reported the highest rates of deception, overcharging, excessive demands for money upfront and poor living conditions.
Poor conditions and exploitative and deceptive conduct were not limited to a certain subset of international students: they were similarly reported by students at universities, vocational colleges and English-language colleges, as well as by men and women of various nationalities.
The report recommends government and universities provide improved housing services to empower international students, and that government strengthen regulation, investigation and enforcement to hold landlords to account and break cycles of impunity.
The Information4Impact Survey is the most comprehensive study of housing and working conditions among international students in New South Wales, and across Australia. It was conducted in April and May 2019, and yielded 5,064 valid responses.
Photo by Madalyn Cox on Unsplash
On 28 November 2018, Laurie Berg and Gabrielle Meagher released the report Cultural Exchange or Cheap Housekeeper? Findings of a National Survey of Au Pairs in Australia. This report reveals that the majority of au pairs in Australia are paid as babysitters but work like housekeepers. This report draw on responses from 1,479 participants who had au paired in households in every Australian state and territory.
Key findings include:
Most participants came to Australia looking for a traditional ‘cultural exchange’, but almost 60 percent found themselves working for around 36 hours a week, doing not only childcare but daily cooking, cleaning and other household tasks.
Average working hours were 34 hours per week; nearly a third (30%) worked 40 hours per week or more.
Taking into account a generous value of room and board, a majority of participants (58%) were paid less than the national minimum wage.
A third of participants worked in families who lived in the most advantaged 10% of suburbs in Australia.
Cultural agencies promote au pairing as a cultural experience. However, participants who used an agency to arrange their placement fared no better than others in relation to working hours, rates of pay or inclusion in family activities.
Most participants did not understand how Australian visa rules relate to au pairing and the consequences of breaching visa conditions.
The report recommends that government provide clear, detailed guidance to au pairs and host families on the employment and other rights of the thousands of foreign au pairs in Australian homes each year, as well as a funded service for assistance and advice.
Digital technology offers the promise to transform the labour migration landscape and to empower workers in new and previously uncontemplated ways. However it also gives rise to a host of practical, ethical and legal challenges. Transformative Technology for Migrant Workers, released today, takes stock of the rapidly evolving landscape of digital tools that businesses, worker advocates and governments have developed to address exploitative recruitment and labour conditions. It considers the factors that contribute to (or undermine) the effectiveness of these tools, and the risks they create for workers and host organisations. The report concludes that technology’s transformative potential will only be realized through responsible and well-considered approaches to the funding, development, and implementation of platforms that respond to migrant workers’ vulnerabilities and the structural drivers of exploitation.
The report focuses in particular on the unprecedented and amplified opportunities digital technology presents for migrant worker engagement, empowerment, and justice. For instance, businesses have mobilized technology to enable them to obtain information from large numbers of workers in their supply chains about their recruitment and working conditions and identify poor practices among suppliers. Digital platforms have been built by worker organisations to connect and organize workers and enable them to share their experiences and strategies, and to take collective action for better working conditions. Worker advocates have also developed digital platforms to transform the power and information asymmetries that underpin exploitation, by enabling migrant workers to access information they need to make choices and assert their rights. Governments and civil society organizations have sought technological solutions to overcome the barriers facing migrant workers who wish to register complaints and pursue redress. In addition to examining transferrable lessons that can be learned from initiatives in each of these spaces, the report considers the ways in which the digital tools create privacy and security risks to workers and legal and other risks to platform hosts. It considers resourcing and other challenges to sustainability and scalability of digital tools, and approaches to design and implementation that ensure the tools are taken up by vulnerable workers and deliver meaningful outcomes to them.
On 29 October 2018, Bassina Farbenblum and Laurie Berg released the report Wage Theft in Silence: Why Migrant Workers Do Not Recover Their Unpaid Wages in Australia. This report reveals that the majority of migrant workers are paid well below minimum wage but very few ever take action to get the wages they are owed. This report, and the 2017 report Wage Theft in Australia, draw on responses to the National Temporary Migrant Work Survey from 4,322 participants across 107 nationalities of every region in the world, working in a range of jobs in all Australian states and territories.
Key findings include:
Among international students and backpackers who acknowledged they had been underpaid in Australia, the overwhelming majority suffered wage theft in silence. Fewer than one in ten took action to recover wages they were owed.
Of the small number who tried to recover wages, two in three recovered nothing. Fewer than one in six received the full amount they were owed.
Only 3% of underpaid participants contacted the Fair Work Ombudsman and well over half of them recovered none of their unpaid wages.
Though it is often assumed that most underpaid migrant workers are not interested or willing to take action to get the wages they are owed, in fact well over half of survey participants indicated that they were open to trying to recover their wages. This suggests that if resources are devoted to interventions that better enable migrant workers to report and address underpayment, many more would do so.
It is commonly assumed that migrant workers won’t report underpayment because they are unfamiliar with the different legal culture in Australia. In fact, Asian participants were the most open to trying to recover their wages.
Participants selected a range of rational reasons why they had not sought to address their underpayment: a quarter indicated fear of possible immigration consequences, close to a half reported that they did not know what to do, and many believed they would not be successful.
Many of these barriers can be practically addressed. There is an urgent need for a new or better process for wage recovery, better resourced support services, and a guarantee that migrants’ visas will not be jeopardised if they report wage theft.
