Wage Theft

The Hon. J.E. HANSON (16:00): I quote:

There’s just nobody walking in my door asking for an internship, work experience or unpaid work, nobody...

I’m generalising, but it definitely feels like this generation of 20-somethings has to be rewarded even if it’s the most mundane, boring thing, they want to be rewarded for doing their job constantly.

I quote further:

In essence they’re working for free, but I can tell you every single person who has knocked on my door for an internship or work experience has ended up with a job. Every single person, because they back themselves.

Those, I am glad to say, are not my words. They are the now infamous words of Muffin Break boss Natalie Brennan. Before we all rush to apologise for words perhaps said in the heat of the moment, the bosses at Muffin Break have form for more than just saying such things. They put them into practice. Not that long ago Muffin Break were found to have underpaid a worker $20,000. But rather than be prosecuted they chose to enter into an arrangement with the government where they promised not to do it again. The recent comments show, of course, that they, like many bosses these days, have learnt nothing.

Let us get this straight: millennials or gen Y, or whatever else you want to call them, are not young and they are not inexperienced. Many were born between 1981 and 1985. Most have been in the workforce for some time and deserve not only fair pay; they deserve respect. Even if you are twenty-something, as Ms Brennan derides, the fact is that we have more than doubled—doubled—what we produce in the workplace in the last 30 years alone. No-one is lazy. We all work hard.

Regardless of their age, workers knowing what they are worth and being confident has a lot of benefit to bosses. Workers having an eye on wages and conditions and not being taken for a ride is consistent with a modern workplace that is family focused and promotes work-life balance. I should say here that a few days after the scathing media, Ms Brennan has since apologised, saying her comments were in some way misunderstood, something I struggle with because they seemed pretty structured to me. But even with this apology from the bosses at Muffin Break, it is simple fact that Ms Brennan's original thoughts are common amongst bosses in Australia. Wage theft and the failure of bosses to adequately pay superannuation to their workers is an endemic problem in Australia.

I only need mention here, for instance, 7-Eleven. In 2015, we saw one of the largest industry-wide underpayment scandals, a scandal that rolls on to even this year. In January 2019, a 7-Eleven owner and store manager were collectively fined $335,664. They are not alone. In the 2017-18 year, courts handed down $7.2 million in penalties to bosses for breaches of the Fair Work Act relating to wage theft. That is an increase of 49 per cent from the previous year. An ombudsman recovered $29.6 million in unpaid wages for more than 13,000 workers in 2017-18, having heard 28,275 requests for assistance. And these are the cases we know about.

From these statistics it seems the bosses are not just guilty of eating out on their workers' wages, they are shamelessly taking the hard-earned dollars of workers because, as Ms Brennan originally said, bosses regard themselves as entitled to do so. So who is affected? None of us will be surprised to learn that it is our most vulnerable industry workers that are, again, at the forefront of being exploited by the criminal activity of bosses.

We also know that wage theft is a form of tax evasion by bosses. When a worker is paid in cash or paid less than they are entitled to, we all see less paid into payroll tax by bosses. They are stealing from all of us as they defraud the tax system. The fact is that bosses are stealing from workers in their thousands. Wage theft is a targeted crime, targeted by bosses at those entering the workforce or those who work in vulnerable work, and targeted in such a manner that any who complain are labelled by bosses as lazy, entitled or not worth giving a job to.

Wage theft is occurring despite courts having financial penalties in place to deter it. Wage theft is spoken about openly by bosses, like those at Muffin Break, as a business model. Wage theft is occurring because the rights and powers of workers and their unions to obtain evidence and pursue negligent bosses are insufficient. It is not occurring to isolated people. It is occurring to young graduates entering the workforce and it is occurring to migrants here for short stays on farms. It is not occurring to young people or 'other generations'. Young families, reliant on the wage of their 37-year-old mother or father, are being robbed by bosses.

It is occurring, and it is occurring on an industrial scale. I deserve, we deserve and my son deserves a better world than where bosses see him, or anyone for that matter, as nothing more than cheap or free labour and where they are labelled as lazy or entitled if they demand any better.