The Fair Work Ombudsman has released a new mobile-phone app which uses geolocation to track and log hours at work, and is aimed at combating the exploitation of young and migrant workers.
The Ombudsman Natalie James told SBS two thirds of all worker exploitation cases taken to the court by the Ombudsman this financial year involved record keeping failures by employers.
"If employers don't have sophisticated time keeping systems or actually deliberately trying to hide exploitation of workers, your own records are really important," Ms James told SBS.
The 'Record My Hours' app prompts users when the phone’s GPS shows they are at their workplace and keeps a log of how many hours they work.
All the data is kept securely on the phone and the user can then choose to send those logs to others.
"You might send it to us if you are worried that you’re not being paid for all the hours you are working, or you might send it to your employer to say ‘My pay slip says something different to what my records say’," Ms James said.
Ms James said logs collected by workers can be important legal evidence in court in extreme cases of worker exploitation and when employers haven’t kept any records of pay.
Young and migrant workers are most at risk of not getting paid for hours worked. Source: AAP
One small business owner Matthew Fletcher, who owns a condiment manufacturing business called The Food Company, told SBS he welcomed the new technology.
His company employs 13 people, and like many small businesses records of worker’s hours are kept manually.
"If there is an error made by us and the employer picks that up, we are quite happy to retrospectively address it. Workers need to be able to protect themselves as well," Mr Fletcher said.
The app is also available in 12 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Hindi and Korean.
Ms James says migrant workers more frequently work in industries with higher levels of exploitation and are particularly vulnerable because of language and cultural barriers.
“Workers from migrant backgrounds are an increasing component of our work. Thirteen per cent of all of the complaints we had last financial year came from visa holders, and visa holders only account for five per cent of the workforce,” Ms James said.
“So we are very concerned about workers from migrant backgrounds”.
