The 7-Eleven underpayment scandal has put the exploitation of international students in the headlines, but the abuse is far more widespread than that, particularly in the cleaning industry. Ann Arnold investigates.
It's late on a Saturday, and the first division men's rugby union game is underway at Mosman Rugby Club on Sydney's affluent North Shore. It's an idyllic setting: a tree-ringed field with a picket fence on a headland that juts into the harbour.
Two slightly bewildered graduate students from Colombia, Kelly and Arturo, are watching on.
Kelly laughs and says she thinks the game is a bit rough: 'I'm trying to understand how it, um, how it works.'
She is also trying to understand how our employment system works. Kelly and Arturo worked as cleaners in 2014—they cleaned the rugby clubhouse once a week, among other jobs on a daily schedule. But for three months, they received no payment from the cleaning contractor who hired them. And they still haven't.
International students are being exploited in their part-time jobs, and the issue goes far beyond the 7-Eleven scandal.
Students often have limited English and little understanding of our systems. And if they're being underpaid and struggling to get by, often work more than the 40 hours a fortnight permitted on a student visa. Many are reluctant to challenge employers, and reluctant to seek help.
Sean Stimson is a lawyer acting for international students at Sydney's Redfern Legal Centre. He has no doubt about the scale of the problem.
'7-Eleven is the tip of the iceberg. There are so many companies that are doing this, if we were to calculate all those individual numbers or multiple numbers, we know that we are going to soon exceed the figure that 7-Eleven has. And that's just within New South Wales. If we look at what's happening nationally, then the numbers are absolutely huge.'
The cleaning industry is one of the hot spots. Pedro* has worked as a supervisor in the cleaning industry and also as a building manager.
'I think that there's a lot of companies taking advantage of international students at the moment and paying them very, very little and having them work a lot of hours,' he says.
'They will happily pay students cash in hand and not give them any benefits. They work six days a week, seven days a week.
'I've seen it, I don't agree with it and I told the managers of those companies that I didn't want those cleaners working like that in my building when I was doing building management.'
At stake is Australia's lucrative higher education industry. Worth $19 billion, it's our second biggest export industry, after natural resources. Reputational damage from the treatment of student workers here is a major risk.
Underpayment is a hot topic among international student in classrooms. As Arturo puts it: 'So many people really don't expect a country with such a good reputation as one of the best places to live in the world, they don't expect to come here and work and be underpaid. Or just not paid at all.'
Our employment laws fail international students for several reasons. One is the capacity of the Fair Work Ombudsman to investigate cases.
Stephen Clibborn, from Sydney University's Business School, found in a recent survey of international students that 60 per cent were being underpaid. He says the Fair Work Ombudsman needs to be better resourced to prevent what he calls 'wage theft'.
'The extent of wage theft found in this survey: employers must be making that calculation and realising there's not much chance of being caught.'
Successive governments have reduced funding for the Fair Work Ombudsman. But with the 7-Eleven scandal still making headlines, the minister for employment, Michaelia Cash, last month made an election promise to give the watchdog an extra $20 million over four years.
However, in Clibborn's survey, practically none of the students were aware of the Fair Work Ombudsman. Once he explained it to them, many were wary. If a complaint is litigated, the Department of Immigration is informed if the student works more than 40 hours a fortnight. That could lead to deportation.
Recommendations have been made by both the Productivity Commission and a Senate committee that information not be passed from the Fair Work Ombudsman to the Department of Immigration.
In apartment buildings, owners' corporations or building managers usually engage the cleaning contractor, and strata companies do the administration. But often those parties don't know, and don't ask, about whether the contractor is paying staff.
Pedro, as an industry insider, has a solution: he believes cleaning companies' employment practices should be audited.
'They should be audited more often, to see how many workers do they have on the field, how many of those are paid, how are they paid.
'I think it's really hard to ask for the population to actually turn around and say, "Hey, this person should be paid better." Even though that's what should happen, we are humans and not all humans think we need to do the right thing. Most humans will say, "Well, if it's not costing me as much, I'm okay with that."'
Or, in some cases, labour is not costing the cleaning contractor anything at all. When a new apartment building in Bondi was completed late last year, a team of Mongolian students was hired to do the initial construction clean. None of them were paid.
'Sara', who ironically worked at home in Mongolia with an agency advising students on work and travel programs, was one of these unpaid cleaners. With more English than most of her peers, she tried to chase up their payments.
'We went to the police, because we are new in Sydney, and we don't know where to go. Because I think it might be, it's our fault. Because we don't know, like, a lot of law or regulation. We wrote some letters to our embassy and to the company. Then we called many times to them.'
Sara's calls to the cleaning company that hired the contractor who employed the Mongolian group brought no result. When Background Briefing rang the company, a director said he didn't want the company name associated with non-payment of labour. His contractor later rang the law firm representing the students, Clayton Utz, and began settlement negotiations. That was more than six months after the work was done.
Few international students have the backing of large law firms and the media to help them seek redress.
Read on Radio National site.
