Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations. Why is action to stop wage theft so important, and how will the Albanese Labor government's closing loopholes legislation protect workers from having their wages stolen?

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Newcastle, someone who fights for jobs in Newcastle every single day—for good, secure jobs.

The good news that has come through in terms of the number of people in work and wages finally getting moving is welcome. But let's not pretend it's shared by everybody. It is true that wage growth under the coalition never had a four in front of it. It never had a three in front of it and the average barely had a two in front of it. But it's also the case that even with wage growth finally coming through, now that we no longer have a government where low wage growth is a deliberate design feature of how they manage the economy, if you're somebody who is having your wages stolen then you are not seeing this.

We can think about when this issue really came to public light, and I want to describe this. Not every underpayment is wage theft, we know that. But let's have a think and remember what happened with those 7-Eleven cases. There were two different forms of wage theft that we saw. The first was the half-pay scam, where people would be rostered formally for half the hours they actually worked. So in terms of the books, nothing was wrong, but in terms of the difference between their hours at work and their pay, they were getting half of what they were actually doing. And the second form of wage theft that we saw then was the cashback scheme, where you'd be paid the correct amount and then the manager would walk you across the store to the ATM in the corner, get you to take a chunk of your pay out and hand it back to the manager. If that exact same worker had walked back around behind the counter and taken money from the till, it would have been a criminal offence. But because it was the employer stealing the money at work, it was not a criminal offence.

Nearly a thousand days ago, I saw something that was extraordinary in the Senate: the opposition, having introduced laws to make wage theft a criminal offence, voted against the provision that they themselves had introduced. And nearly a thousand days later, this morning, they did it again! They did it again! The one crime they seem to be relaxed about never putting on the books is when a worker has their wages stolen. Loopholes need to be closed. Workers should not be in the situation where, somehow, if theft occurs to them it's just always something we turn a blind eye to. It needs to be a crime, and the loophole— (Time expired)