Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I present the first interim report of the Select Committee on Job Security on on-demand platform work in Australia. I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

This first interim report of the Senate Select Committee on Job Security, and the context in which the inquiry was undertaken, is important. Australian workers have suffered through record low wage growth under this government over the last eight years. The Australian middle class is shrinking in this country under this government's watch. The government forecasted in the recent federal budget that real wages would decline over the next four years. The Reserve Bank has warned that stagnant wages are a risk to our economic recovery. It's clear, even before the pandemic, that there is something structurally wrong in our economy. When wages have stopped growing, this is where the inquiry into job security comes in.

The first interim report is the first ever report by this parliament focused specifically on the impact of gig platforms on the Australian economy and Australian jobs. Next year will mark the 10th anniversary of Uber's launch in Australia. Uber now claims to be the second-largest employer in Australia, with 120,000 workers across rideshare and the food industry. Not a single one of these 120,000 drivers and delivery riders, who were on the front line during the pandemic, are classified as employees or have rights as contractors. Instead, they're described as entrepreneurs, each running their own individual small business for Uber. I think that sounds absolutely absurd. When one brave Uber Eats worker, Amita Gupta, questioned this logic in the Federal Court, Justice White said, 'I'm just wondering whether we're operating in the real world.' As the Transport Workers Union revealed at one of our hearings earlier this month, Uber was so scared about the outcome of that case and the precedent it would set for operators and their operations that they agreed to settle Ms Gupta's case for $400,000. The amount she stood to gain, if she won, was just $15,000 as a maximum. Uber settled at more than 25 times the amount that Ms Gupta was asking for so as to ensure that their workers would not be classified as employees.

This model, of course, is not unique to Uber. It is the business model for the majority of platforms we hear from. Why? Because under the existing industrial relations framework, if you are an employee, you're entitled annual leave, sick leave, superannuation, protection from unfair dismissal, workers compensation and a minimum wage. But if you're an independent contractor, as these companies deem them to be, you're entitled to none of these rights. Companies like Uber and Amazon have made a lot of money avoiding those rights. The inquiry has received evidence from numerous witnesses that the average hourly wage for delivery riders is a disgrace.

According to the Transport Workers Union, the average pay for food delivery workers is just $10.42 an hour and as little as $6.67 an hour. The dissenting report by the coalition senators on this committee has contested this figure as being politically motivated, but in addition to the Transport Workers Union data, a submission by academics from the University of Sydney, the University of Western Australia and Edith Cowan University put the average wage rate at just $12 an hour. Other evidence received from the Centre for Future Work and, separately, from the Young Workers Centre makes similar assertions.

The only data supporting the claim by Uber and the dissenting report comes from Uber itself. Uber says in its own report, of itself, that it's paying the minimum wage under 'certain circumstances', not all. In actual fact, when they were cross-examined during inquiry, they very clearly admitted that the rate that they were paying, which they said was above the minimum wage, did not include superannuation, did not include workers compensation and did not include other entitlements that we take for granted in the Australian community. I asked Uber what their riders earn outside peak times. They refused to respond, because they just calculated their underpayment during peak times. They couldn't even get it right. They obviously don't know what the minimum wage is, from their own evidence, let alone from their 'experts', who obviously don't know what the minimum wage is. Companies like Uber and Amazon despise transparency, which brings me to the first group of recommendations in this interim report. It is that the ABS and appropriate regulators begin collecting data on and from gig platforms. We need their data or we'll continue to be fed lies and half-truths, like Uber has done here.

The next set of recommendations in this report concerns safety and workers compensation. If you're getting paid just $6 an hour, then you need to rush and take risks on the road. In just a few months at the end of last year, the lives of five delivery workers—Dede Fredy, Chow Khai Shien, Xiaojun Chen, Bijoy Paul and Ik Wong—were taken while working for these platforms, and because Safe Work does not properly collect data on gig worker injuries and fatalities, there could be more deaths that have never been revealed. There may be people in this country who have gone to work and never come home, and we don't even know about it. That's an absolute disgrace. Recommendation 3 calls for Safe Work finally to be empowered to collect this data, after 10 years and who knows how many injuries and deaths. It's also a disgrace that the families of these five riders have been denied access to workers compensation because they were independent contractors, as deemed by their employer. Recommendation 6 of this report calls for the system to be changed to ensure any platform worker, regardless of their status, receives the basic rights. But we should not stop there. Recommendation 7 calls for changes to the Fair Work Act to ensure that workers who fall outside the current definition of 'employee' are not left without basic rights and protections.

Recommendations 9, 10 and 11 deal with giving the Fair Work Commission a new, low-cost tribunal. The ability to resolve disputes involving vulnerable workers, like gig workers, against these powerful multinational platforms in an affordable, accessible and fair way is critical. Speaking of vulnerable people, the most outrageous evidence the committee has received is about the creeping infiltration of our publicly funded and highly feminised sectors—the NDIS and aged care. Big gig platforms like Mable and Careseekers are saying—like Uber—that their workers are classified as independent contractors. As with Uber, these workers are paid below the minimum wage. This is about caring for our most vulnerable Australians: the elderly and the disabled. These are the people who are doing that caring.

How do we treat them, under this government's watch? The government has said consistently that it's too complicated to give these workers minimum rights and minimum conditions. The Morrison government gave $5 million to Mable to provide surge workforce in an Anglicare aged-care home near Penrith last year. Anglicare told the royal commission that 'it quickly became apparent that the staff at Mable could provide but did not have the skills and qualifications that were needed'. Seventeen residents died of COVID-19 in that home.

This government is paying gig platforms to rip off workers and deliver inadequate care. And it gets worse. I thank the Australian Services Union for raising this issue of this inquiry, because Mable and other platforms classify these NDIS carers as independent contractors, and they may not be liable for safety under our workplace health and safety laws. The government is allowing these platforms to offload legal liability for safety to our most vulnerable Australians, the disabled. Neither Safe Work Australia nor the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission have confirmed whether disabled Australians are legally liable here. It is horrifying, and it is a ticking time bomb.

A number of recommendations in the report deal specifically with the reckless spread of gig platforms into our national treasure, the NDIS. This is just the first report— (Time expired)