Khanh Tran reports for Honi Soit
For international students, following two years of COVID-19 restrictions, many are used to studying offshore and living at home. As students return to Sydney, the lack of university-owned affordable housing is causing a burgeoning crisis. The issue will hit current and incoming international students especially hard as by mid-2023, all international students must return to campus.
Data provided by the University of Sydney indicates that university-owned residences have a total capacity of approximately 2400 students on the Camperdown/Darlington campus. Based on 2021’s enrollment numbers, USyd could only house around 3.2 per cent of all students on the main campus. When residential colleges are factored into the equation, that figure jumps to nearly 6 per cent.
Speaking to Honi, Redfern Legal Centre’s (RLC) Sean Stimson, who leads the RLC’s International Student Legal Service NSW, is frank about the multitude of issues facing international students. Stimson estimates that a large majority of students (60 per cent) need to work in order to cover daily living expenses and this generates a vicious cycle of wage theft cases.
“We’ve had clients that presented to us that they [are] earning $10-$11 an hour. You’re [employers] basically cutting in half the financial income that they [students] could derive from working,” Stimson says.
The reason why wage theft is a particularly persistent problem for international students, Stimson explains, is that some employers threaten to report those who work more than 40 hours per fortnight to the Department of Home Affairs.
Read the full article (1 November, 2022).
