Precarious work and the reluctance to complain: Italian temporary migrant workers in Australia

ABSTRACT

The reluctance of many temporary migrant workers (TMWs) to challenge poor wages and conditions is an important puzzle for both research and policy. This article explores the puzzle by drawing on in-depth interviews with Italian TMWs who have had recent work experience in food services and/or farms in Australia. The article describes their experiences of precarious work, marked by widespread and systematic underpayment of wages in breach of minimum wage regulation. It shows that few Italian TMWs challenged underpayments, whether through collective or individual action. The article reviews the varied rationales offered by the interviewees for their reluctance to pursue an individual complaint about underpayments. It finds that fear of employer reprisals was a powerful and understandable barrier to action. Also influential, however, were attitudes that had the effect of downplaying the significance of low pay in the current job, for example, by means of a judgment that the current job is only a temporary stage in a long-term life-course project. The findings indicate that reluctance to complain needs to be situated in relation to other forms of migrant worker agency, both within and outside the workplace, and the social relations in which they are embedded.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• temporary migrant workers
• precarious work
• wage theft
• Italian migration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. New Zealand citizens and permanent residents can freely enter Australia under a special sub-class 444 visa, without time limits on their stay and with unrestricted work rights, though without access to most social security payments (see Mares 2016: 50–51, 128–153). The total number of persons on 444 visas at the end of March 2018 was substantial, estimated at 669,115 (Department of Home Affairs 2018). New Zealanders are a special case because their labour market profile resembles ‘local’ workers, i.e. Australian citizens and holders of PR, more than other TMWs.

2. In critical realist philosophy, the agency is understood as ‘embodied intentional causality or process, which issues in a state of affairs that, unless it was overdetermined… would not have occurred otherwise’ (Bhaskar 1994). It is stressed here that agency is linked with the structure as two moments of a single social reality. Human agency has a dual character, in reproducing or transforming social structures, just as social structure has a dual character in both enabling and constraining human agency (Harvey 2002).

3. Most underpaid TMWs state that they are discontented with their pay (Reilly et al. 2017, 38), but this still leaves a minority who declare that they are contented, and even in the case of the discontented majority the level of discontent varies.

4. Though ‘cash-in-hand’ is a familiar everyday synonym for undeclared or off-the-books work in Australia (Li 2017), payment in cash is not in itself illegal. Illegality comes in when the worker does not receive a pay slip that accurately records hours and pay and the employer fails both to deduct tax (where applicable) and to forward tax and superannuation payments (where applicable) to the Australian Taxation Office. Undeclared work is significant because it obscures the employment arrangement and acts as a cover for further unlawful employer practices such as underpayments.

5. Precise calculation of below-minimum hourly rates is difficult (Clibborn 2018). The National Minimum Wage sets a benchmark, but this applies to permanent workers, and casual workers should receive an additional 25% (the ‘casual loading’) to compensate for missing benefits such as paid annual leave. At the time of the interviews, the National Minimum Wage for permanent employees was just over $17, but the minimum hourly wage for casual employees at the lowest classification in the Restaurant Industry Award was just over $21. Many casual employees in our sample should also have been entitled to higher payments (‘penalty rates’) for work in non-social periods such as evenings and weekends, thereby further raising the relevant minimum wage rate.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (AU) under Grant number DP130100443.

Notes on contributors

Iain Campbell

Iain Campbell is an experienced researcher in the field of employment relations, with special expertise in precarious work, working hours, casualisation and trade unions.  He currently works as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Employment and Labour Relations Law at the University of Melbourne.

Maria Azzurra Tranfaglia

Maria Azzurra Tranfaglia is a labour lawyer with extensive work experience both in academia and in private practice in Italy and in Australia. She is currently undertaking a PhD in Comparative Labour Law, focusing on the protection of workers involved in triangular work arrangements such as agency work and labour hire.

Joo-Cheong Tham

Joo-Cheong Tham is Professor at the University of Melbourne Law School. His research spans the fields of labour law and public law, with a focus on law and democracy and the regulation of precarious work.

Martina Boese

Martina Boese is a Lecturer in Sociology at LaTrobe University. Her research interests include migrant and refugee mobilities and employment experiences, regional migration and settlement, migration and settlement policies, and racism and exclusion.