An article in the Sydney Morning Herald (big newspaper here in Australia) titled: 'Black jobs': Rampant exploitation of foreign workers in Australia revealed
Its ungated if you want to read it ... but here is the gist of it:
- hundreds of thousands of workers across the economy, in food courts, cafes, factories, building sites, farms, hairdressers and retail - being exploited on low wages and believing they have no power to ask for their rights.
- The comprehensive study in conjunction with Monash University* has revealed 80 per cent of foreign language advertisements offering wages below legal rates. Many of them are openly advertised as "black jobs".
Not a pleasant story at all.
There are arguments that wage rates in Australia are excessively high, and they may have some merit. Lets have the debate on the open, by all means. But breaking the law, and at the expense of visitors to our country, is not a solution.
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OK ... market implications ... ?
Inflation has been, and is, low in Australia. If the cost of labour increases, as it may very well do if there is a clampdown on this sort of exploitation of foreign labour in Australia, it will feed through to the inflation rate, and even worse perhaps stifle an already low growth rate.
This is something to keep an eye on going forward.
