Last month, (march) an SBS reporter, posing as a job seeker, approached the owners in over 20 Vietnamese restaurants on the suburban streets of Melbourne.
Armed with a hidden camera, this is what the "job seeker" encountered.
(Boss:) "I will keep your salary for one week. The salary this week will be paid next week, in case you quit the job after some days."
(Job seeker:) "Can I ask how much you will pay me please?"
(Boss:) "No, don't ask about the wages, (or) I don't hire you ... Training, $120 per day, cash, pay every week ... You will work for me 12 hours per day, 7am to 7pm."
(Job seeker:) "But my previous boss paid me $17 per hour."
(Boss:) "Huh? Seventeen dollars an hour for a waitress? I can't pay you that high."
Newly arrived Vietnamese students often turn to Vietnamese business owners, hoping to find work to support their stays in Australia.
But students who have spoken to SBS describe how many of them become engaged in a series of work experiences where they are exploited, underpaid and, often, verbally abused.
They report salaries for international students working in hospitality regularly range between $8 and $12 an hour.
But there is an even deeper bottom.
Former international student Helen Nguyen (nuh-WIN) says, in her first three weeks working in a restaurant, she earned an hourly wage of just $6.
And, she says, she endured constant abuse from her employer.
"They said I was too young and that they felt sorrow, sympathy, for me. So they hired me and paid me $35 per day during the training period. I was so happy. I did not know the minimum wages in Australia were about $16, $17 (an hour). They promised that, if I worked hard for them during a long time, they would pay me more. Then I realised the business owner was making fun of me."
SBS has spoken to many international students and found many have similar stories of working life in Australia.
Another Vietnamese student named Aggie Phan, studying at a Melbourne university, describes the working conditions she encountered under a woman at a Cambodian restaurant in Melbourne.
"She treated me like an animal. And I don't think it just happened to me, it happens to a lot of international students. I didn't think I could become a victim, everything I'm after, (but) exploitation. I don't have a right. Even I went to toilet, they monitored me. Even I don't have a right to eat at lunchtime. When I cried and told my father that I felt a little bit like maybe I made a wrong decision when I came here and everything that happened is not like I imagine about Australia, especially Melbourne -- Melbourne is one of the most livable cities in the world ... But it did happen. It did happen."
Exploitation of international students risks damaging Australia's second-largest export industry, education, now worth up to $17 billion.
The latest statistics show more than 460,000 students are studying in Australia.
Of them, more than 22,000 are Vietnamese, ranking fourth among all sources countries, behind China, India and South Korea.
In 2015-16, the Fair Work Ombudsman completed close to 2,000 dispute-form lodgements on behalf of visa holders in Australia.
Of them, 95 per cent of the allegations involved underpayments.
A spokesman for Fair Work says it is aware of the issues around migrant workers, including international students.
"The Agency is focused on ensuring more is done to ensure culturally and linguistically diverse business operators understand and comply with Australian workplace laws. We understand that there are cultural challenges and vastly different laws in other parts of the world, but we want to increase awareness that it is essential that all businesses operating in Australia understand and apply Australian laws. "
One student, requesting anonymity, says international students are willing to agree to any terms because they need the money to survive in Australia and often have few options.
He says the owners at the restaurant where he has worked carefully instructed him in how to deal with Australian Taxation Office officials if they suddenly visited the restaurant.
"They paid me $8 per hour, cash in hand. I had just arrived in Australia. I had no idea about labour law, and I had no qualifications. I accepted to work for any wage in order to support my parents in Vietnam. When I worked there, my boss taught me that, if anyone came in and asked who am I, I must say I'm a family member helping a brother to take care of the restaurant and that there is no staff here."
A student from Vietnam named Loc Lam told SBS about other unlawful practices that occurred in the restaurant where he once worked.
"When I worked for a restaurant, I saw they had two financial notebooks. In an official book, they listed a few employees. For example, if there were 10 staff for one morning shift, they only wrote down four people. But in another notebook, they recorded the right roster of 10 people. At the end of the financial year, they would submit the fake notebook."
The president of the Footscray Asian Business Association, Wing La, admits the competition between small businesses is hard and says businesses cannot pay the minimum wage.
"Most of them are family businesses, making profit by selling their own work. They want to sell their products with a competitive price, and so they must find ways to hire cheap labour. Small businesses are facing a competitive market, and, in order to survive, they do wrong things."
Wing La says it is not fair to blame businesses for underpaying the workers and says the exploitation is not happening only within the Vietnamese community.
Meca Ho, of the Victoria Street Business Association in Richmond, argues Vietnamese food is much cheaper than other food.
"They (businesses) always worry about overhead costs. The food that we're selling at the moment, 10 bucks. Consider between (Vietnamese food), Thai, Italian food, $25, $30 for a dish. And you come with two persons, 100 bucks. But for two Vietnamese bowls of soup, $20. And how many restaurants there are? So many competing now, a thousand of Vietnamese restaurants. It's so hard to compete."
An associate professor at the University of Melbourne's Melbourne Law School, Joo Cheong Tham, agrees pressure to compete is a key to pay being below the minimum wage.
The Fair Work Ombudsmen calls it a "culture of complicity," and Joo Cheong says it makes everything much more difficult.
"A culture of complicity. And that's one of the hardest things, in terms of moving forward. So, it's not just employers and their representatives not coming forward, it's the workers are not coming forward to speak. And some of them (students) are already in breach of their visa because they are working excessive hours, so they think that, if they bring a complaint to the Fair Work Ombudsman, that the Ombudsman is going to pass on the information to the Immigration Department and then, therefore, they're susceptible to deportation."
However, Professor Joo Cheong Tham insists the employers should face their obligations.
"It is quite clear that it is the employer's obligation to ascertain, firstly, what the legal entitlements of the workers are and to make sure that the employers comply with these entitlements. It's not for the workers to insist upon their entitlements. It's not for the workers to actually advocate for their entitlements."
The national manager of the Salvation Army project Freedom Partnership to End Modern Slavery, Jenny Stanger, says exploiting international students is "one step away" from modern slavery.
She says it is difficult to truly calculate how many international students in Australia are being exploited.
"One of the reasons it's difficult is so many international students are vulnerable and feel scared to reach out for help. They don't know who they can trust. They don't know what will happen if they reach out for help. And so it's a very difficult number to measure."
Last October, the Federal Government established a Migrant Workers' Task Force to deal with the exploitation of migrant workers in Australia's workplaces.
But many international students, like Aggie Phan, say they are disappointed with the Australian Government's efforts so far.
"Please, government, the authorities, please protect us. Please pay more attention on us. And I think they should send staff there to investigate, to find out the problem, to find out who underpays or to find out who does tax evasion. And, for those who underpay, they have to get a heavy fine."
Jenny Stanger, from the Salvation Army, says she expects the Government to work more to look after what she calls this "resource of the Australian economy."
"International students make a lot of money for Australian educational institutions. They make a lot of money as part of the tourism. They contribute so much to our economy, and, yet, so many of them are being used and abused right in our neighbourhoods. So it's certainly a group of people that deserve respect and support, acknowledgement for the constant abuse that's happening, and we need to be doing something about it."
