A brilliant report about "Why Migrant Workers Do Not Recover Their Unpaid Wages In Australia" has been created by Bassina Farbenblum and Laurie Berg this month.
Temporary migrant workers comprise up to 11% of the Australian labour market.
Underpayment within this workforce is both widespread and severe.
In 2017, the report Wage Theft in Australia: Findings from the National Temporary Migrant Work Survey revealed that a substantial proportion of international students, backpackers and other temporary migrant workers were paid roughly half the legal minimum wage in their lowest paid job in Australia.
The scale of un-remedied underpayment of migrant workers in Australia is vast: 7-Eleven’s internal wage repayment program alone repaid over $150 million in unpaid wages to its mostly international student workforce.
The report draws on responses from 4,322 migrant workers who participated in the National Temporary Migrant Work Survey (NTMW Survey), including over 2,250 participants who expressly acknowledged that they had been underpaid while working on a temporary visa in Australia.
Focusing on this group of underpaid participants, it seeks to identify the practical, psychological and other factors that inhibit temporary migrant workers from recovering unpaid wages and, for those who do attempt to recover their wages, the institutions they approach and outcomes of their efforts.
It also seeks to illuminate the ways in which these experiences and perceptions differ between different groups of temporary migrant workers including different nationalities and visa cohorts.
A quarter (24%) of participants who held a 457 visa during their lowest paid job selected immigration concerns as a barrier to wage recovery.
This report is worth reading.
Source: Wage-theft-in-silence.pdf