Jobs offering as little as $9 an hour, well below the minimum wage, are being posted on Chinese-language websites in Australia.
Calls to restaurants, massage parlours and tea shops that advertised on the websites backpackers.com.tw and tigtag.com uncovered numerous cases of below-award wages for jobs targeted at Chinese-speaking students and visitors on working holidays.
The investigation was carried out with the advocacy group Taiwanese Working Holiday Youth (TWHY).
Most of the jobs offered were with relatively small, family-owned businesses, but in one case the man who answered said he was hiring for a Sydney branch of the Taiwanese teahouse chain Chatime. The global franchise has more than 1,000 branches, including 60 in Australia.
He said the service role based in the Sydney suburb of Parramatta paid working holidaymakers $9 an hour for the first month and $11 an hour thereafter. Payment was to be cash in hand, but a tax file number was required.
The full-time adult award rate for a food and beverage attendant is $17.35. Overseas visitors must be over 18 to be on a working holiday visa in Australia.
Chatime Australia confirmed with Guardian Australia the ad was for a job at the company’s Paramatta store but said as it was a franchise the company was not involved in the hiring of employees.
A spokesman said via email: “Chatime franchisees fully understand their rights and obligations to their employees. This is something that is continually communicated to them. We certainly take these accusations seriously and we will pursue the matter further with the franchisee in question.”
The Parramatta branch of Chatime did not respond to calls.
A Japanese restaurant in Melbourne offered working holidaymakers $10 an hour. A Brisbane massage parlour offered 45% commission of all bookings with no basic wage. Inexperienced staff were expected to do one week of training without pay. A contracting company advertised for a fruit picking job in central Queensland with a piece rate of 11 cents to 14 cents per branch picked and no basic wage.
TWHY spokesman Yao-Tai Li said working holidaymakers often did not complain to authorities about pay and conditions because they lacked confidence in their English. Along with low wages, workers also often faced long hours, poor work conditions and, in some cases, sexual harassment by their employers, Li said.
The treasurer, Joe Hockey, announced in this week’s budget that working holidaymakers will be taxed on every dollar, instead of being able to claim the $18,200 tax-free threshold.
The Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO) was unable to comment on individual cases, but said there were nearly 1 million recently-arrived visa-holders with working rights in Australia. An FWO spokeswoman told Guardian Australia overseas workers could be vulnerable if they were not fully aware of their workplace rights or were reluctant to complain.
“We are conscious that youth, language and cultural barriers can also create difficulties for overseas workers,” she said.
One in 10 requests for assistance to the FWO are now from from visa-holders working in Australia, more than ever before. “That’s significant and is a trend that is concerning us greatly,” the spokeswoman said.
Of the workers who contacted the FWO, 60% were male, more than a third were aged 26-30 and most were born in Korea, China, Germany, France or India.
Industries known to employ significant numbers of overseas workers include horticulture, cleaning, convenience stores and trolley collecting. A recent Four Corners report investigated the use of foreign workers in the fruit picking industry and poultry factories, with one Queensland grower equating the work conditions and pay to “slave labour”.
But the largest number of requests for assistance from overseas workers, nearly one in four, come from employees in the accommodation and food services sectors.
The FWO established an overseas workers’ team (OWT) in 2012. In the first nine months of the current financial year, it recouped $1.2m in underpayments for 345 visa-holders, surpassing last year’s figure of $1.1m.
The spokeswoman said it was impossible to visit every workplace in Australia to carry out checks, “and nor should we”.
“Education is equally as important as deterrence in achieving compliance with workplace laws.”
The ombudsman has an interpreter service and educational material translated into 27 languages, including Chinese. A recent campaign targeted overseas workers with advertisements in Korean on Korean websites.
Workers from non-English speaking backgrounds have extremely limited access to the Fair Work system and a large number of Australian employers “have turned this knowledge into a profitable business model”, Jo Schofield, national president of the union for hospitality workers United Voice Workers said.
A report by United Voice showed extensive exploitation of international students in Melbourne’s office cleaning industry where some were underpaid up to $15,000 per year. Union members have proposed “whistleblower” protections for foreign workers and the introduction of an immigration inspectorate at the FWO.
Schofield said workers’ rights are best protected where there are enough people to support each other, so small businesses pose the greatest challenge. “Dodgy employers are often masters of re-invention: when they are discovered, they shut up shop and re-emerge, rebranded in a new location.”
Unions should be given better access to workplaces to assist workers who may have breached their visa conditions without the threat of deportation to allow them to create the conditions needed to work legitimately, she said.
Ten, a former backpacker and massage therapist from Taiwan, got a job at a Sydney massage parlour in 2013 (he withheld his real name due to signing a non-disclosure agreement).
Among the parlour’s 10 staff members, he said, only two were experienced masseurs. The rest were students with little or no experience.
The parlour’s owner, a woman from Beijing who had lived in Australian for more than 20 years, told Ten his pay consisted of commission only – 45% of any booking. The owner demanded he fill out falsified masseuse accreditation, he said. “When I refused she rolled the certificate up and bopped me on the head!” Ten said. After two weeks, Ten resigned. He made several requests for his pay, which were ignored.
Ten said for most backpackers the story would end there. Most choose to cut their losses and hope that the terms and conditions of their next job will be better. “Chinese and Taiwanese people are afraid of going through the legal process,” said Ten, or are limited by their lack of English proficiency.
But he filed a complaint with the FWO, then took the matter to the small claims court when his employer failed to appear at scheduled mediation sessions. After nine months, and having enlisted the services of a pro bono lawyer, he received amounts equalling the minimum award wage, tax and superannuation – almost double the amount of the original cheque.
He said that persistence was “very, very, very uncommon” among his peers, but he hoped his actions would help improve the situation for backpackers in Australia.
Stories of working-holidaymaker exploitation in Australia have found their way back to Taiwanese media. In one account, a 26-year-old Taiwanese backpacker recounted being paid $14 an hour at a Thai restaurant. Fulfilling any dream of getting rich in Australia was impossible, the backpacker said, “not unless you eat nothing, drink nothing and sleep by the side of the road”.
Li, from the TWHY, said that no matter how low the wages offered, “there will always be people willing to do the job”. But it was unfair working conditions – not backpackers – that should attract criticism and that needed government action.
“It’s not a unique problem, that’s only applicable to Taiwanese or other pan-Chinese migrants or students. It’s a widespread, common phenomenon around Australia. Lots of people doing these ‘black market jobs’ are local Australians.”
