AUSTRALIA TENS OF THOUSANDS OF FOREIGN STUDENTS EXPLOITED BY EMPLOYERS DESPITE THEY BRING $ 22 BILLION TO ECONOMY AND BIGGEST WAGES THEFT HAPPENS IN $ 170 BILLION FRANCHISE INDUSTRY AND GOVT ALLOTTED $ 20 MILLION MORE TO FAIR WORK COMMISSION BUT NEED MORE INSPECTORS TO NAB CULPRITS
Published: July 20 2017 - 9:57PM
Wage fraud is the sinister underbelly of Australia's third-largest export earner, tertiary education. One in four students at Australian universities has come from offshore. Not only did those 300,000 young people pay a total of
$22 billion in tuition fees in 2016, surging by a fifth from the previous year, they pumped billions more into the community through rent and other living expenses.
They have been of great benefit to the economy, but the economic circumstances have been challenging for them.
Thousands of these students struggle financially, and survive by working in menial roles in workplaces that are exploiting and underpaying them, often taking advantage of their imperfect English and their fear of creating strife and losing their visas, even though they are legally permitted to work here.
They work, predominantly in food outlets and convenience stores, alongside locals who are also being scandalously underpaid. There is bountiful evidence, much of it the result of investigations by The Age, that wage fraud is committed widely and brazenly.
The latest alleged example came a few days ago when the Fair Work Ombudsman launched legal action against Melbourne restaurants Dainty Sichuan and Tina's Noodle Kitchen, which allegedly paid employees as little as $10 an hour, well below the legal minium, while they worked 10 hour-plus shifts, sometimes seven days a week. The ombudsman says the two restaurants underpaid staff by more than $30,000 in just two weeks.
Since publishing the story, The Age has been contacted by a large number of students with similar stories.
But perhaps there is reason for optimism: the Fair Work Commission is using its recently expanded resources and strengthened sanctions to tackle the abuse.
After investigations in The Age detailed widespread wage fraud in the $170 billion-a-year franchise industry and elsewhere, the Coalition government took to last year's election a commitment to a tenfold increase in fines, a $20 million funding increase for the Fair Work Ombudsman and the appointment of the former head of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Professor Allan Fels, as the chief of a new Migrant Worker Taskforce.
Further layers of workplace regulations are not the solution to wage fraud. The solution is to stringently enforce existing laws.
Given the buttressing of the Fair Work Commission, it is to be hoped the government will be able in coming months and years to report the eradication of this social, moral and economic scourge.
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