They're the revelations seemingly without end: from pizzas to posh nosh, from convenience stores and corner cafes to supermarkets, on farms and in franchises across Australia, investigations continue to show that workers' are being paid less than they are legally entitled to.What is wage theft?
Wage theft is distinct from the problems involved in casual and insecure work, the gig economy and the government’s policy to reduce penalty rates, because it involves unlawful activity.and elsewhere have shown that, in some sectors of the economy, it is not a fringe activity but a business model.This has wider implications: if one business is paying less than award wages, it makes it difficult for their competitors to compete and even harder to give their staff a pay rise.
To reduce the risk of being caught, the franchisees largely employ foreign workers on visas. These overseas workers often don’t understand their rights or are too afraid to speak up for fear of being deported. The franchising sector employs more than 500,000 workers and accounts for almost 8.9 per cent of GDP.
Only in recent years has there been a real attempt to organise farm workers through the National Union of Workers .The results have been dramatic with dozens of cases emerging of workers paid a pittance and of them being abused by unregulated middlemen.
Underpayment is the Australian business model. Some just call it mass immigration.
Its Australia business model. If you make it illegal Australia economy collapses. Simple as that .
Here is a new term to add to “wage theft”. It’s called “job theft”, which is what happens when unions force wages above market rate and steal jobs from the resulting unemployed.
Happens when a union and an employer agree to an EBA that reduces workers conditions for a suitable payment to said union - such as Bill Shorten's AWU