Young workers ‘being cheated’
* Ben Schneiders
* January 19, 2009
Source: The AGE

YOUNG workers are being exploited in large numbers in the retail and hospitality sectors, a blitz by the workplace watchdog has revealed.

The Workplace Ombudsman recently audited 400 employers nationwide and found 41 per cent, or 165 employers, had underpaid a total of about 1500 staff aged between 15 and 24.

Ombudsman Nicholas Wilson said the blitz by inspectors focused on industries that typically employed young people, with nearly nine out of every 10 of the breaches in either retail or accommodation and food services.

Most of the breaches were due to the underpayment of wages and penalty rates and Mr Wilson said the ombudsman had clawed back a total of $540,300 for the affected young workers.

That is an average of $360 for each employee.

Christian organisation for seafarers…

Stella Maris Seafarers Centre

The Justice and International Mission Unit is part of the Victorian and Tasmanian Synod of the Uniting Church in Australia …

Justice and International Mission Unit

Catholic employer group …

Australian Catholic Council for Employment Relations

FairWear is made up of Christian, women’s, migrant and employee groups …

FairWear Victoria

FairWear South Australia

FairWear QLD

Also, check out the excellent submission from the Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia submission (by Bev Myers) (the TCFUA is part of the FairWear campaign).

From the Clean Clothes Campaign:

In November 2007, Huang Qingnan of the Dagongzhe (DGZ) Migrant Worker Centre in Shenzhen, China was seriously injured after being stabbed by two unidentified men.  The assault followed on the heels of two other violent attacks on the DGZ Centre, which provides a free library, labour law education and free legal consultation to the many migrant workers in Shenzhen.  The attacks appear to have been an effort to prevent the Centre from empowering migrant workers and educating them about China’s new Labour Contract Law, which went into effect in 2008.

The DGZ Worker Centre after it was attacked

Five suspects, including a local businessman who owns several local factories, have been detained since January 2008.  Contrary to the law, the trial was long delayed.  On December 24, 2008 a hearing was finally scheduled at Longgang District Peoples’ Court.  Some 60 supporters from Mainland China, Hong Kong and abroad came to the court to serve as observers in this critically important trial, but the room was too small to accommodate the supporters. Rather than risk that the trial begin without the observers present, Huang Qingnan accepted the court’s offer to delay the hearing which is now scheduled for January 16, 2009.
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Take action now! Please call on the Chinese authorities to ensure that a fair and open trial takes place and that justice is served.
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Miki Perkins
January 14, 2009

Source: The AGE

Squatters occupying three Melbourne University-owned houses in Carlton – evicted in an early-morning police operation today – have threatened to occupy other university sites to highlight the plight of homeless students.

- Squatters turfed
- Police scale fence
- Early-morning operation

More

Sunday 18th January, 10:30 AM – 12:30 PM

At Federation Square

There are an estimated 284,000 child labourers working in exploitative conditions in West Africa that produces 75% of the world’s cocoa for the production of chocolate. An estimated 12,000 of these children have been trafficked to plantations in Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast). This event is to help end trafficking and exploited labour on West African cocoa plantations.

Watch the video here for more information, download our poster and share it with your friends and colleagues, forward them a link to this event, and come along and enjoy some tasty, child slavery free chocolate fondue!

More information Fair Trade Association and Stop the Traffik

The event is organised by Stop the Traffik (of which the Justice and International Mission Unit – sponsor of JustAct – is a member), Micah Challenge and the Fair Trade Association of Australia and New Zealand.

By Roger Maynard, Australia Correspondent, Straits Times Singapore

International students in Australia are often given misleading information by overseas recruitment companies and frequently exploited in the workplace, a new report has claimed.

The report, which looked into the way the international student community is treated in Australia, has raised concerns about the lack of affordable accommodation and underpayment by employers, among other things.

The study, by The Overseas Student Experience Taskforce, focused on the state of Victoria and was instigated in September in the wake of media and word-of-mouth criticism about local conditions.

International education is Victoria’s biggest service export, and as many as 133,000 foreign post-secondary, vocational and higher education students contributed an estimated A$3.9 billion (S$3.8 billion) to the state’s economy last year.

Highlighting what it considered to be one of the central issues facing these students, the taskforce report said many of them fall victim to Australia’s ban on foreign students working more than 20 hours a week.

Most work beyond the stipulated hours and live in constant fear of being reported to the authorities.

‘The consequence is often that overseas students are at risk of workplace exploitation as they fear they will be reported to the immigration authorities and then deported,’ the report said.

An example of workplace discrimination it mentioned was the case where, for the same job, an Australian student was paid A$14 an hour and an overseas student A$9.

According to the Union for Fast Food and Retail Workers (UNITE), this was only the tip of the iceberg.

In a submission to the taskforce, the union revealed the case of a Chinese student who worked for 20 days on a trial basis in a 7-Eleven franchise and alleged that the owner manipulated the books to misrepresent the number of hours worked for pay received.

‘These kinds of horror stories should not, by now, be news to government,’ the union said.

‘The 20-hour work restriction, coupled with the lack of avenues for international students to come forward to complain about breaches of workplace rights, has created a thriving black market in which gross underpayment of wages, fraud by employers, bullying and intimidation of international student workers thrives,’ it added in its submission.

In response, the taskforce recommended that students who performed well academically should be permitted to work for more than 20 hours a week.

It also recommended that education institutions be required to provide access to affordable and appropriate housing for overseas student in their first six to 12 months in Victoria.

On the question of offshore recruitment agencies providing misleading information, like favourable long-term visa outcomes, the inquiry urged the authorities to set up a register of education agents.

Australia’s Immigration Minister has already pledged to widen legislative powers to tackle the problem.

While the taskforce’s brief did not look at the standard of teaching in Victoria, the report does recommend ‘an effective and responsive quality-control process…recognising that Victoria’s reputation for quality is hard won and can be easily tarnished’.

The study comes hot on the heels of last week’s federal Bradley Review of Australian Higher Education, which claimed that foreign students were all too often regarded as cash cows used to bolster budgets for domestic students and research.

Click here to read the story on the Straits Times site

EFI NEWS
January 06, 2009:

The Evangelical Fellowship of India welcomes the recent orders passed by the Supreme Court of India directing the Orissa State government to take all necessary measures to protect the minorities in India.

Recently we asked:

Why is Fairtrade cotton important? We have found out about child labour behind Egyptian cotton sheets!

Here are some alternatives:

Fairtrade cotton alternatives – bed sheets to dog collars (and you can even ‘get shirty’ about poverty)

Recently, the Guardian newspaper in the UK found that children as young as six are working 10-hour shifts in 40C heat for 20 pence a day making Egyptian cotton sheets; their job? Picking the cotton that makes the world’s finest bed linen.

Thankfully the New Internationalist (a World Fair Trade Organisation) is producing a cotton sheet alternative made by the Chetna Organic Farmers Association which is certified as Fairtrade by FLO-International (Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International) – this ensures that small scale cotton farmers from developing countries receive a fair and stable price for their goods and labours. Additionally they receive a Fairtrade premium which enables them to invest in their farm businesses and communities.

Get shirty about poverty with Rise Up

Closer to home, Rise Up Productions is selling business shirts in addition to clerical shirts made from Fairtrade cotton.

No Sweatshop shirts with Fairtrade Cotton

Find out about the Rise Up shirts promoted by Dan MacPherson.

Even dog collar shirts …

For women ... and men

The Rise Up clerical shirts came from an idea by Simon Butler, curate at St Giles Church in West Bridgford in the UK. All of the shirts are made from 100% Fairtrade Certified Cotton – not the usual scratchy and uncomfortable poly-cotton mix.

Article on children picking cotton in Egypt

Sheets made from Fairtrade certified cotton

Buy your minister a clerical shirt made from Fairtrade certified cotton

Message from Clean Start

Melbourne city cleaners are celebrating as they get ready to vote up their first-ever union collective agreement through the assistance of the LHMU, a union that has a strong focus on social justice as their work with refugees attests.

Cleaners have been campaigning for two-and-a-half years to improve average wages of just $300 a week and shifts as short as two hours.

This agreement gives cleaners the fairer pay, conditions and job security they need to build a bright future.

Support from you, the voices of the community, has helped give Clean Start the strength to stand up day after day and win.

But one major contractor, Pickwick Eski, has not signed the agreement.

The AGE reports (11/12/09):

International tourist numbers are dropping (with figures for the three months to September 2008 showing 40,000 fewer than in the same period in 2007).  In 2008 the economic contribution by all visitors grew by 7 per cent to $24.5 billion on the previous year (2007), although that growth was almost entirely driven by the education market which accounts for a third of the expenditure.