Andrew Charlton (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to support the Migration Amendment (Strengthening Employer Compliance) Bill 2023, to strengthen employer compliance for temporary visa holders working in Australia. Migrants are incredibly important for our economy. According to ABS data, in the year 2019-20, 26.3 per cent of all jobs in Australia were held by migrants. That's over a quarter. That's 5.3 million jobs. Thirty per cent of those jobs were held by temporary migrants. That means temporary migrants held 1.6 million jobs. That's about 10 per cent of our labour force. Temporary migrants make an enormous contribution across Australia's industries to fill workforce shortages and do millions of jobs that Australia needs to keep our economy powering forward.

Migrants are incredibly important for our economy, and without them our economy would grind to a halt. They contribute so much to our local communities through their culture and language. They enrich what it means to be Australian. Migrants look after us, and, in turn, we must look after them. But, unfortunately, for all that migrants are doing for our economy, they are being exploited, underpaid and ill-treated in many parts of our labour force.

The bill before us today addresses the exploitation of Australia's temporary visa holders. The reality for these workers has been laid bare in numerous dire reports. The Migrant Workers Taskforce report in 2019 showed that wage theft from migrants is an issue that we haven't known very much about historically but is rife within our economy. The National Temporary Migrant Work Survey of 2017 revealed that as many as 50 per cent of temporary migrant workers may be being underpaid in their employment. That means, as a temporary migrant worker, you are as likely as not to be the victim of wage theft—one in two. The report goes on to say that the wage exploitation of temporary migrants offends our national value of fairness. It harms not only the employees involved but also the businesses which do do the right thing and are panelised by comparison to those that do not. The Grattan institute in May 2023 showed that exploitation of temporary migrants in our labour force is widespread. Up to one in six of recent migrants are paid less than the national minimum wage, compared to just nine per cent of Australian workers—that means between 27,000 and 82,000 workers across Australia. Between 6,500 and 42,000 are underpaid by at least $3 an hour. This is wage theft on a grand scale, right across our economy, impacting the most vulnerable and lowest-paid workers.

These incidences of exploitation and wage theft are rife across many Australian industries. The construction industry, the second-highest industry employer of temporary residents, at 44,300 people, was described in a 2017 report by the Australian Institute of Criminology as particularly problematic when it comes to employment standards of temporary migrants. That report highlighted a range of areas of noncompliance with employment standards, despicable practices like the confiscation of workers' passports and some cases of actual physical abuse. In the food and beverage industry the data shows the situation is not much better. This industry is the most common industry to employ temporary migrants. More than 100,000 temporary migrants work in the food, beverage and hospitality industries—12 per cent of all temporary migrant workers. Before the pandemic, recent migrants were four times as likely to work in hospitality than long-term residents, but those who worked in hospitality—an industry which particularly relies on migrant workers—were found even more likely to be underpaid than those in other industries. They are younger, they're less skilled, and they're ripe for exploitation.

There were so many examples across these and other industries of how temporary migrant workers have been exploited. The first was the simple underpayment of wages: workers being underpaid for the hours they worked, workers asked to work extra time without being paid, and workers having entitlements that they deserved not provided. The second area was unfair dismissals: without being given a reasonable justification or where there was no warrant for dismissal in the first place. The third was unpaid training. The fourth was tax avoidance by paying workers only in cash. These are practices which rob temporary workers of their rightful wages, rob Australians of taxation revenue, and create an unfair playing field where those businesses that are doing the right thing are disadvantaged.

It gets worse than that. There are incidents highlighted across these reports of migrant workers being pressured to break their visa rules, of misclassifying workers as independent contractors rather than employees, of workers having their passports withheld, and of threats to have the workers' visas cancelled. We've seen example after example of these horrific practices being perpetrated on Australia's temporary migrant workers. One of the most egregious was the case 7-Eleven. In 2020, 7-Eleven was forced to pay back $173 million to workers that their franchisees had ripped off. This was systemic underpayment of wages. In some cases workers were forced to withdraw their wages from an ATM and pay them back to their employer. That's how brazen it was—workers were forced to withdraw their wages from an ATM and pay them back to their employer. There was absolutely no regard for the law, and completely wilful ripping-off of these workers. The migrant taskforce report in 2019 determined that wage exploitation was systemic across the 7-Eleven network. It wasn't a minority of stores, it wasn't a few bad apples—the majority of 7-Eleven stores were involved in this wage exploitation. After these practices were first revealed to the public in 2015, 7-Eleven outlined a number of measures to prevent wage fraud amongst their franchisees. They made investments in technology to centrally record employee attendance, they made greater investments into enforcement and compliance through field investigations, and they created a noncompliance complaint hotline for employees. Still right throughout the economy the practices that were so rife at 7-Eleven are perpetrated across many different sectors. Another example highlighted by the Migrant Workers' Taskforce report was the case of NQ Powertrain and July 2023 reports of this labour-hire company being fined $106,000 for exploiting migrant workers at its North Queensland farm. This exploitation included unlawful deductions from workers' wages and workers being brought in on the Seasonal Worker Program but noncompliant, and these practices were happening for years. In 2021 the Levitt Robertson class action for workers on the Seasonal Worker Program revealed workers were losing up to $300 per week from their wages.

I think a lot about my electorate when I think about these cases. Parramatta is home to 113,000 people born overseas. That's over 55 per cent of the electorate's population. Parramatta is one of the most multicultural electorates in the country based on the percentage of the population born overseas. We have nine university campuses in Parramatta. People are drawn to Parramatta from all over the world to come here to study and build a life for themselves and their families. Many of those people, whether they be students or people on temporary visas, are here working in these arrangements. They are some of the most vulnerable workers in our community, people that have come to make a contribution to Australia and a contribution to themselves, but ultimately end up in exploitative workplaces. If I think about the scale of this challenge and apply it to the electorate of Parramatta, in the 2021 census 81 per cent of Parramatta's population were working either full or part time. If this data on the number of people exploited across the country were repeated across Parramatta, then one in six of those people would be exploited. That's about 5,000 people in my electorate working in exploitative conditions; 5,000 people being underpaid; 5,000 people living with the threat of a visa cancellation or passports being confiscated; 5,000 people living without the rights they deserve; or 5,000 people being forced to work overtime, not being paid for training or being forced into employer arrangements that aren't warranted based on the nature of the work they do.

That is why the bill before us today is so important. The key objectives of this bill are, firstly, to strengthen employer compliance laws, making it fairer for Australian businesses who do respect the rules and ensuring they are not undercut by scrupulous competitors; secondly, to remove barriers which discourage workers from speaking up and seeking support; and, thirdly, to implement two recommendations of the Migrant Workers' Taskforce report. Specifically, that's recommendation 19:

… that the Government consider developing legislation so that a person who knowingly unduly influences, pressures or coerces a temporary migrant worker to breach a condition of their visa is guilty of an offence.

Adding new criminal offences building on existing laws in the Migration Act to make it a crime to coerce migrant workers into breaking visa rules and to make it a crime to unduly influence, pressure or coerce unlawful migrants to work—that's the first one. The second one is recommendation 20 of the migrant workers report—that is:

… that the Government explore mechanisms to exclude employers who have been convicted by a court of underpaying temporary migrant workers from employing new temporary visa holders for a specific period.

To implement this recommendation the government is introducing a new prohibition measure. It's designed to stop prohibited employers from hiring temporary migrant workers who are not sponsored—for example, international students—it aims to stop unscrupulous businesses from reoffending and exploiting more vulnerable people and it will help even the playing field for Australian businesses who employ migrant workers but have been disadvantaged by unscrupulous competitors for too long.

When you put these measures together, they aim to stop unscrupulous employers from gutting their workers wages, to stop them from pressuring workers to break their visa rules and to stop workers from being threatened with visa cancellations. It's about making sure that our labour market is fair. It's about restoring the national value of fairness, which in this field has for too long been undermined.

This legislation goes to the core of the country that we want to be. We want to be a country that attracts people from all around the world, that is a magnet for talent, hope and ambition in the four corners of the globe, that brings people to this country in ways that we have across sequential waves of migration, that brings people to this country to build a better life for themselves and ultimately to build a better nation for everybody. But we undo that ambition and thwart that national objective if we don't treat these temporary workers with the dignity and respect they deserve, if we have one in two of those temporary workers being underpaid and one in six exploited in other ways. It is a national shame. It betrays our aspiration to be a great, multicultural nation, and that's why this legislation is so important.

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