29-year-old Bhumika Aneja was underpaid at a local Indian grocery store in Melbourne for more than two years while she worked there.
Despite raising her concern with underpayment, the absence of payslips and penalty rates, her employer complied with the law only after Aneja approached Fair Work Ombudsman.
Aneja is one of the many migrants who have complained about workplace exploitation.
SBS Hindi has earlier reported several cases of workplace exploitation and highlighted that underpaying international students and temporary migrants is rampant across various sectors in Australia.
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24-year-old Mr Singh* was paid $200 for his first three days but then made to work without pay six days a week for next four months while he worked as a cook at The Curry Tree restaurant in Perth.
Two Indian international students were short-changed by the owner of an Indian restaurant in suburban Melbourne.
While Fair Work Ombudsman is the prime Australian authority which looks into wage theft and investigates workplace complaints and enforces compliance with national workplace laws, a more serious alternative has been proposed by a Labour council in Victoria.
The Victorian Trade Hall Council, comprising of 40 affiliated unions, has told SBS Hindi, they are pushing for a legislation to make ‘wage theft’ a crime, punishable by up to 10 years in jail.
“We want the Victorian government to add a clause to the Crimes Act (1958) which makes deliberate, dishonest wage theft a crime punishable by a term of imprisonment,” Young Workers Centre’s Keelia Fitzpatrick told SBS Hindi.
Ms Fitzpatrick said the organisation has held several informal discussions with the Victorian government.
Ms Fitzpatrick cited figures from a recent joint study by University of Technology Sydney, UNSW Sydney and Migrant Worker Justice Initiative titled ‘Wage theft in Australia’: Findings of the National Temporary Migrant Work Survey by Laurie Berg and Bassina Farbenblum which says substantial proportion of international students, backpackers, and other temporary migrants were paid around half the legal minimum wage in Australia.
“The study says a quarter (25%) of all international students earned $12 per hour or less and 43% earned $15 or less in their lowest paid job. And extremely poor wage rates ($12 per hour or less) were reported by at least a fifth of temporary migrants from every nationality. There are people who deliberately do not pay the legal wages and therefore we have proposed that such people should be prosecuted,” she says.
BEING UNDERPAID AT WORK?
If you think you're being exploited at work, or are an employer or employee seeking assistance, visit the www.fairwork.gov.au or call the Fair Work Infoline on 13 13 94. An interpreter service is available on 13 14 50.
