The production of precariousness and the racialisation of Pacific Islanders in an Australian horticultural region

ABSTRACT

Over the last ten years, temporary migration schemes in the horticultural sector have received increasing attention in the Global North. The often precarious conditions of such work have been recognised, however, little attention has been paid to horticultural workers with migration backgrounds who have gained permanent residency or citizenship in the host countries. Ethnographic fieldwork with Pacific farmworkers and their families with various migration statuses in Australia, including seasonal workers, irregular migrants, and permanent residents, revealed that precarious employment conditions in horticultural work impact Pacific people across and beyond different legal statuses, challenging the notion of a clear correlation between irregularity and precariousness. This includes the children of migrants with Australian citizenship who are often employed as casual farmworkers and find it difficult to secure any other work. We argue that their experiences are fundamentally related to their position as ‘racialised’ workers. This paper sheds light on this racialisation of farmwork and its implications for the experiences of Pacific people as residents and workers in regional Australia.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration status
• precariousness
• racialisation
• Pacific Islander
• regional Australia

Introduction

Near the small horticultural town of Robinvale in north-west Victoria, Sita, a 30-year-old Tongan-Australian woman who grew up in the region, was working as a casual farmworker.¹ In her mother’s house, a German working holiday maker², Emma, was boarding because she found accommodation for working holiday makers was ‘filthy’ and ‘unhygienic’. This was Emma’s second time in Australia on a working holiday visa. On her previous trip, Emma and Sita had worked on the same farm and become friends, and Sita invited her to stay in her family’s house when she returned. Sita was picking grapes on the farm, being paid a ‘piece rate’ (i.e. by the quantity she picked), while Emma was working in a packing shed and paid by the hour. Although one might assume that Australian citizens would have more stability and job security than working holiday makers, this was not the case as Emma, a European backpacker, was paid hourly and had stable work for the couple of months she intended to stay before having a holiday then returning to Germany. Sita, who had Australian citizenship and lives in the region, was paid according to how much she could pick and as the grape harvest was nearly finished, she was anxious about finding more casual farmwork, which was her only and insecure source of income.

Current studies on the workforce in the horticultural industry in Australia are disproportionately focused on temporary migrants, such as seasonal workers, international students and working holiday makers. The focus on specific migration schemes prevents us from understanding the complexities of the horticultural workforce, including the experiences of permanent residents and their children who work in this sector. Utilising data collected during fieldwork in north-west Victoria between 2014 and 2019, in this paper we explore how and why Pacific farmworkers with various legal statuses all experience varying degrees of precariousness at work.³ We argue that this precariousness cannot be explained solely by either the generally poor employment conditions in the sector or precarious legal status but is fundamentally related to their position as ‘racialised’ workers. This racialisation has tended to keep Pacific people in the region in precarious employment and underlies the structural barriers they encounter when seeking alternative employment. We conclude that a comprehensive understanding of precarious work in the horticultural sector requires the consideration of racialisation as a critical factor at play that adds to and outlasts precarious legal status.

Precariousness, migrant work and race

Migrant work in the horticultural sector has attracted the attention of scholars across several disciplinary fields, from employment relations to labour geography and employment law. Many researchers have highlighted the prevalence of exploitative employment conditions experienced by migrant workers on farms, in orchards and in food processing in North America and across Europe (e.g. Holmes 2013 on the US; Rogaly 2008 in the UK; Rye and Scott 2018 in Europe). Problems range from wage theft and unsafe working conditions to precarious accommodation conditions and even sexual abuse of workers, facilitated also by the ‘out of sight’ locations of most work in the sector. Development scholars and political economists have also questioned the development impacts of guestworker schemes such as the bracero-scheme in the US and Canada (e.g. Basok 2000; Preibisch 2007).

In Australia, studies on migrant horticultural workers in the area of socio-legal studies and employment relations have documented the wide-spread lack of adherence to labour law and poor employment conditions experienced by different categories of migrant workers. These range from wage theft and excessive overtime to sexual and other physical abuse, breaches of occupational health and safety regulations and even forced labour (Howe et al. 2020; Underhill and Rimmer 2016). In employment research the term precariousness has been used to refer to ‘job characteristics that involve insecurity, such as a low level of regulatory protection, low wages, high employment insecurity and a low level of employee control over wages, hours and working conditions’ (Campbell and Price 2016, 314; see also Vosko 2010, 2; Vosko, MacDonald, and Campbell 2009, 7). Underhill and Rimmer (2016) have mapped different layers of vulnerability against the internal diversity of the agricultural labour force and identified undocumented workers who are additionally liable to deportation, exclusion from unions and social isolation as the most vulnerable segment of workers, followed by Working Holiday Makers . While there has been little research on undocumented workers (see Nishitani and Lee 2019; Segrave 2019), most Australian research on horticultural workers, similar to its international counterparts (e.g. Weiler, Sexsmith, and Minkoff-Zern 2020; Rogaly 2009) has focused on different temporary migrant workers (Berg and Farbenblum 2017; Howe et al. 2020).

Temporary migrant workers are understood as ‘persons who live in a host country without a right of long-term residence and who undertake paid work during their stay’ (Boese et al. 2013, 317).⁴ In Australia temporary migrants encompass a range of visa holders such as Working Holiday visa holders, international student visa holders, and Pacific Australia Labour Mobility Scheme (PALM) participants.⁵ Each of these schemes includes different entitlements and restrictions, including different eligibilities which produce inequalities between these groups, both as residents and as workers. It is notable that citizens of the Pacific Islands states are ineligible to apply for the Working Holidays visas and the PALM scheme is one of the few ways for them to work in Australia, which has merged the Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP) and Pacific Labour Scheme (PLS). These were introduced as development/labour supply initiatives, aimed at enabling circular labour migration with fixed-term employment periods in Australian regional areas, outside major cities, leading to remittances to the participating Pacific Island states (Rosewarne 2019). De facto the schemes have perpetuated Australia’s shift to ‘guest-worker’ schemes with their restrictions on workers’ agency compared to citizens and permanent residents (Wright and Clibborn 2020). Different also from Working Holiday visa holders and international students, the PALM-scheme participants are tied to their specified approved employers and their residency right is tied to their employment, which makes these temporary migrants from the Pacific more vulnerable to exploitation than Working Holiday visa holders because they cannot leave and choose a different employer if they are not treated fairly (Stead 2021a).⁶

The role of migrants’ legal status (from here onwards referred to as migrant status) has emerged as a key explainer of precarious migrant work also for other visa holders and employment sectors in Australia (see Boese et al. 2013), as well as in other countries such as Canada (Goldring and Landolt 2022; Fudge 2012; Goldring, Berinstein, and Bernhard 2009) and the UK (Anderson 2010). The concept of precarious migrant status in particular has contributed to a better understanding of the ways in which insecure legal status produces insecurity at work (Reilly et al. 2018; Van den Broek et al. 2019). In Australia, the concept of ‘precariousness’ has also been applied in analyses of the experience of participants in the Seasonal Worker Programme, which created a fertile ground for exploitation with its design as employer-sponsored and employer-driven programme (Howe et al. 2020; Petrou and Connell 2018; Stead 2019, 2021a, 2021b). Building on the work of Rogaly (2008) in the UK, more recent research has also highlighted the implications of changes in the political economy of Australian horticulture for workers’ vulnerability to exploitation, highlighting the role of intensified supply chain pressures, the emergence of labour market intermediaries, and the reduced presence of trade unions (Van den Broek et al. 2019). These structural explanations of the wide-spread poor employment practices among horticultural employers have challenged the focus on migrants’ legal status as the primary explanation of precarious migrant work while also challenging the common reference to individual ‘bad apples’ among employers and drawing attention to industry-systemic sources of unlawful employer practices.

What is noticeably missing from the scholarship on migrant work in the Australian horticultural sector is a concern with race and racialisation (but see Stead 2021a; Stead, Taula, and Silaga 2022), which is surprising given Australia’s history of enslaved labour from the Pacific Islands on Queensland’s cane fields in the nineteenth century (Stead 2019), the reliance on Aboriginal farm labour as part of Australia’s colonial project (Butler and Ben 2021) and the ethnic segmentation of other parts of the labour market in Australia (e.g. Colic-Peisker and Tilbury 2006; Boese 2017). We understand ‘race’ here as a social construction that is significant because of its persisting ordering role in social relations, including in the extraction of labour, and as fundamental for an understanding of coloniality (Lentin 2015). Racialisation is understood as the process whereby racial significance is ascribed to groups by others (Murji and Solomos 2005). Analyses of the position of racialised workers in agricultural labour markets in North America have long highlighted how ideologies of race structures these labour markets. Preibisch and Binford (2007; see also Binford 2013; Binford and Preibisch 2013) highlighted the role of racialised understandings of agricultural labourers in the implementation of foreign worker programmes in Canada in their analysis of the replacement of Caribbean workers by Mexicans in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. Maldonado (2009), for example, showed that the racial division of labour and hierarchies within agricultural workplaces in the US are continually reproduced by employers through mobilising racialised perceptions and assessments of Latino workers. These racialisation processes vary in their shape and impact on different groups including second-generation Latinos in the US. Building on these examples of racialisation in the agricultural sector in other settler colonial countries, this paper aims to develop a better understanding of the significance of race and racialisation among horticultural workers in Australia.

Pacific settlers, irregular migrants and seasonal workers in Sunraysia

Most of the research was conducted in Mildura and Robinvale, regional towns close to the Murray River that forms the border between the states of Victoria and New South Wales. The towns are hundreds of kilometres from major cities and while Mildura is much larger, both towns are characterised by populations spread between the township and surrounding agricultural and horticultural properties, renowned for vast almond and citrus orchards and vineyards. The areas is known as ‘Sunraysia’ and includes irrigated horticultural lands utilising water from the Murray and Darling rivers.

The area’s landscape has completely changed since the arrival of the first white settlers and the displacement of Aboriginal people, which was followed by the southern Europeans who began arriving in the nineteenth century, and later a range of other nationalities (Moran and Mallman 2015). Today, the population of Sunraysia is predominantly of Anglo-European origin, but there is also a significant Aboriginal community as well as people from many ethnic groups including long-term settlers, more recent migrants and refugees, and irregular migrants. The research on which we draw in this article was conducted in this region between 2014 and 2019, focusing broadly on the socio-economic status and well-being of Pacific Islanders (Lee, Nishitani, and Wickham 2019).⁷ The data collection methodology included participant observation among Pacific diaspora communities in the region and at key events, as well as semi-structured interviews with 93 Pacific residents and 13 representatives from health services, state government, the education sector, community organisations and service providers. A detailed survey of 104 Pacific households was undertaken, covering 296 Pacific people, and 18 focus groups and workshops were held with Pacific high school students and young adults, high school teachers and principals, and members of the project’s Pacific Advisory Group (a total of 63 people, some of whom attended more than one session). Informed consent was given by all research participants, either by signing a consent form or by a recorded verbal agreement. The Pacific Islander research participants include Tongans, Fijians, Cook Islanders, Solomon Islanders, and one ni-Vanuatu man. The participants’ migration statuses are varied, and they include settlers, irregular migrants and seasonal workers.

Sunraysia experiences influxes of transient workers, including Pacific workers employed through the Seasonal Worker Programme. In the horticultural sector, the main source of employment in the region, workers in formal temporary migration schemes provide only a small proportion of the total labour force. According to a 2019 survey of 73 local growers in Mildura, Robinvale and surrounding areas, conducted by the Victorian Farmers Federation: ‘67 percent of growers said they were understaffed, and 71 percent of growers surveyed in Sunraysia believe they have irregular workers on their farms’ (Pepe 2019, 8). A horticultural industry association official interviewed in another recent research project suggested that ‘80-90% of the Mildura and Robinvale workforce were undocumented’ (Howe et al. 2020).

Since the 1980s some of those irregular workers have been Pacific people. Early Pacific migrants, initially from Tonga, were attracted by the job opportunities available on farms and by the relative lack of surveillance in regional communities, as many did not have work permits. Over time, some were caught and deported, and others were able to gain permanent residency or Australian citizenship and continue to live and work in the area. New arrivals with visitor visas also continue to come and work in the region and try to regularise their migration statuses.⁸ Some of these people have remained in irregular migration status for over two decades.

Another source of Pacific settlement in the region has been unemployed Pacific migrants with New Zealand citizenship (Special Category Visa), who moved from cities to horticultural towns in search of employment opportunities when the Australian government limited their entitlements to access welfare from 2001. Tongans and Samoans with New Zealand citizenship, and Cook Islanders whose country has an associated-state relationship with New Zealand, settled in the Sunraysia region and worked in the horticultural industry. While some Pacific people eventually acquired salaried jobs in large agribusiness companies such as in almond orchards and carrot farms, most continued to do casual seasonal farmwork (Lee and Nishitani 2018). Their continuing precarious employment has meant that unlike the early waves of European settlers to the region, Pacific migrants have not purchased farmland, and few own their own homes in the towns.

What follows from the above is the co-presence of Pacific Islanders in the region who are not only from different countries but also hold different legal statuses, from ‘regular’ participants in the Seasonal Worker Programme to ‘irregular’ visitor visa overstayers, from temporary visa-holders to Australian citizens (Nishitani, Lee, and Wickham 2019). In the following, we refer to our research participants as settlers, who are either Australian citizens or permanent residents, irregular migrants, who aim to stay long-term in Australia but do not have any formal status, or seasonal workers, who were employed through the Seasonal Worker Programme. These different groups are involved with one another, and local stakeholders are not only well aware of the long-standing presence of ‘undocumented’ workers from the Pacific but also draw on local Pacific Islanders as sources of support for new arrivals of seasonal workers. Settler communities in the region offer voluntary pastoral care by inviting irregular migrants and seasonal workers of their denomination to their own church or to social events.

The production of precariousness and experiences of racist at work

The neoliberalisation of the agricultural sector in Australia has transformed Australia’s rural demography and labour markets (Argent and Tonts 2013). In this shift, rural farmers have become an essential part of the global networks that include not only global free trade agreements for agricultural products but also reliance on international migrants as workers (Argent and Tonts 2013, 140). Richard, second-generation Italian farmer in Sunraysia, explained this change in the sector: ‘years ago, you worked on one farm, your family worked all together; it was okay but today it’s just too hard. Family is all separated, and by yourself, you’ve gotta employ lots of workers’. Richard described the difficulty managing the cost of hiring personnel and how, in order to save money, he transformed half of his family vineyard into a garlic farm. He can manage that by himself for most of the year except during harvesting, when he employs 40 migrant workers for three to four weeks. In contrast, table grapes cost him much more because it takes about three months for fourteen people to complete the harvest. In addition, he employs ten to twelve people for about three months for pruning. Therefore, from the workers’ point of view, table grapes provide jobs for about six months, while garlic provides work for only a few weeks.

Richard also explained that hiring practices had changed, with increasing use of contractors:

Contractors approach us and they bring workers. Before, [Pacific people] came to the farm, knocked on the door, and [farmers] employed them. But today, the contractors got everything together … [Pacific people] used to come as family … a big family group of six or seven people … because being in there for so long, right, everyone knows everyone. That’s why the Islanders work in one farm and stay there for ten years. They work on that farm all the time but now it’s changed. Contractors changed everything.

Richard’s account shows that before the arrival of contractors, farm work could provide a reliable source of income for Pacific migrants to settle in the region. Many research participants, irrespective of their migration status, identified the changes in recruitment practices as described by Richard, and in particular the use of contractors, as a problem. In addition to disrupting ongoing employment relationships between farmers and Pacific settlers, contractors also reduce workers’ pay by taking margins. Therefore, whenever possible, many Pacific settlers and irregular migrants still try to be employed directly by farmers, but this is becoming increasingly difficult.

The shift to farmers utilising contractors also has other impacts on Pacific settlers, as described by a female Cook Islander settler. She said:

it is getting very hard. Because before there wasn’t much people coming to the farm work. Now there’s so many contractors trying to look for work … So you gotta be quick to get in, or you gotta know the farmers and they know you are a good worker. You have to be a really fast worker and yeah. Yeah, there’s just more contractors now than before.

While both settlers and irregular migrants agree that being employed directly by farmers is better than being employed under contractors, in either case they often encounter problems such as late payments, wage theft, uncertainty about the terms of employment, lack of formal payment documentation and occupational health and safety breaches. Both groups consistently experienced precariousness at work. Although the irregular migrants were particularly vulnerable to exploitation and ill-treatment, settlers were not free from precariousness at work.

A Tongan female settler described late payment in combination with being undercut by contractors:

With the employers, we were expected to get paid on Friday. They’d say, ‘I’m sorry, no one bought my fruit, so can I pay you next week?’ Another problem with contractors now; the farmers say they give money to the contractors but … they take whatever they take and then give you this bit of money.

Sita, a Tongan settler whose vignette was presented at the beginning of this paper, also was regularly paid late and underpaid: ‘Last year the farm that we work for, there’s always an issue with the payment. It’s always late and the hours is always wrong’. When asked how they responded to such payment issues, most research participants said they did not take any action, even those with work rights, whether based on their citizenship or visa. Sita explained that the only option is to leave the farm and find another, as the workers felt they had no protection from such treatment. Another Tongan female settler spoke about workers’ lack of knowledge about their rights when she explained what they did when they were underpaid:

Just wait. Move on … Because we don’t know who else to talk to … And, plus, we don’t know who else can give you the money … And it has to wait. And if [the employer] can’t give it to you, that’s it. We don’t know the next step. Most of our Tongans, they don’t know the next step. Who to talk to help [with] that.

Settlers who engage in precarious work can access some minimal security through Australia’s welfare system and they have recourse to rights protection even if most do not seek that protection. However, irregular migrants have no access to the public safety net (Rizvi 2022), which led this irregular migrant from Fiji to value the advantage of working for a contractor:

If you work for a contractor, the contractor is going to look for work for you … When this season is finished the contractor will try to look for another place for you to work. That’s good advantage of working under contractor.

Yet she also highlighted the risk of being exploited:

Contractors, some of them are good and some of them they play up with workers too. That’s what’s going on with our friends working with us. Like the contractors have been playing up with them. With their money, take their money and not paying them one week, two weeks, three weeks.

Similarly, Alisi, a Tongan irregular migrant, described how her precarious migrant status directly produces precariousness at work:

They didn’t gave us the right money. Sometimes they told us to wait, and we wait and wait and wait … We can’t do anything because we are overstayers. We feel bad, but that’s it. We can’t do anything, we don’t go anywhere, we don’t tell anyone anything.

These examples show that both settlers and those without lawful migrant status from Pacific backgrounds experience underpayment and late payments and struggle to resolve the issues for different reasons; for the former a lack of rights awareness and for the latter, a lack of rights.

In addition to precariousness related to payment, both settlers and irregular migrants highlighted experiences of breaches of Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) regulations, such as having to work while chemicals are being sprayed. A Cook Islander female settler explained:

They’re spraying and you’re outside … They’ll be spraying at another patch but it travels to where you’re working … The chemical is so strong. It just gives you headaches … Because the chemicals just flies. Especially on windy days.

Irregular migrants experienced even more severe breaches of OHS such as not being granted access to water on days when the temperature was 40 degrees Celsius or more:

When I first started working like I find it very hard. I really find it very hard. First day it was really, really, it was very hot because that day it was 42 degrees … Then we were running out of water when we worked there and the place where we work was very far from our cabin. We couldn’t walk back to get water.

Another woman reported that she was told to ‘just keep going on picking’, when she asked to go home on a 40 degree-day. Another irregular migrant shared her concern that she was accommodated in a place where the roof threatened to collapse, and other participants described a range of other deeply concerning health and safety issues.

While settlers and irregular migrants can seek employment, directly or through contractors, at any farm with work available, seasonal workers have no freedom of movement (Nishitani and Lee 2019; Petrou and Connell 2018; Stead 2019, 2021a). Leaving one’s employer, no matter for what reason, is called ‘absconding’ and constitutes a breach of the visa (Department of Education, Skills and Employment 2021). Once workers leave work and do not return within a period of time, their temporary visas are cancelled and they become ‘unlawful non citizens’.

Both settlers and irregular migrants claimed the seasonal workers are in the most precarious position of all Pacific Islander farmworkers due to this restriction to working for the approved employer. A Pacific liaison officer interviewed for our research said that if they are employed by a ‘good’ employer who meets the responsibility to protect workers’ wellbeing and if harvests are good, workers can potentially take around AUD$15,000 home by the time they complete their six or nine months of work. However, if they are taken to a farm with a poor harvest or employed by contractors who do not fulfil their duty to provide work or conduct excessive deductions for accommodation and transport, they need to see their contract out without having the right to change employers.

During fieldwork, at church and social gatherings, and in interviews, it was common to hear about problems experienced by seasonal workers and many settlers expressed concern about how best to support them. The responsibility for pastoral care for seasonal workers was left to the discretion of employers, and diaspora communities filled that gap by using their own limited resources.⁹ Some employers liaise with diaspora communities, organise church services and supply pastoral care, but other employers try to isolate Seasonal Worker Programme participants from local Pacific communities. Some even stop settlers from visiting people or charge high fares for bus trips to town, where seasonal workers usually go to do their shopping and might establish other social networks in the area. The following quote from Losa, a Tongan farm worker with Australian citizenship, illustrates both the precariousness experienced by SWP participants and the important roles filled by settler communities who compensate for the flaws of the programme: ¹⁰

I had a cousin in Queensland and she rang me and she said, ‘Oh please can you go and buy some second-hand clothes for our cousin out there? And maybe go and buy towels and soap and stuff’ and I said, ‘Why? What’s going on?’ She talked to me and she said that they are hungry, they don’t have any food, and they had no work, sitting there for three weeks with no job … That’s how I found out. I went there to pick her up and she came here and she ate, but she was not really eating. I said, ‘Come on, you eat, eat’. She cried and she said, ‘I came with my friends here and they are hungry. They don’t have anything to eat’.

When Losa visited her cousin’s accommodation, she found that none of the workers (36 in total) had blankets. She went back home to bring all her blankets to give to them. She contacted other Tongans and planned a social event as well as donating food and other household necessities like soap and toilet paper to the group. Losa continued:

From that time I took food everyday down to the caravan. When the contractor found out that the story is going out in the community, … then she [contractor] stopped me from going there to visit them … They didn’t like it because they got a bad name and they were ripping off people.

Stories like these are common, which indicates why many settlers and irregular migrants regard being an irregular migrant as preferable to being a seasonal worker, despite the dominant political discourse which portrays the highly regulated system of the Seasonal Worker Programme as providing security for workers. Combined with the significant lack of pastoral care and freedom, many research participants agreed that being an underpaid SWP participant or even left destitute due to lacking any income at all, compares poorly to earning a decent income and having the freedom to move and select employers as an irregular worker. However, service providers interviewed in the project warned that this interpretation is dangerous. While some ‘absconders’ may be able to receive support from diaspora communities and their experience in Australia might be improved, there are cases where they have been stranded in isolation without any support or money. Many of them have limited English skills, which makes it more difficult to seek help. Moreover, some of the sending countries enforce strict punishment of those who breach their visas, such as preventing anyone from that person’s village from participating in the programme, which would cause long-term negative impacts on their lives even when they eventually go back home.¹¹

In addition to experiences of precariousness at work, the research participants spoke about their experiences of racism at work. It was reported that employers call Pacific workers ‘dumb coconuts’ (a derogatory reference to their origin in the islands) and other abusive terms. These are experienced by both migrants – from irregular migrants, seasonal workers to settlers – and the children of migrants. A Cook Islander male youth who works on a farm said: ‘When we muck up at work, do something wrong, “Oh, you coconut, you got a big head but nothing inside”’. While the children of migrants tend to question these behaviours, if not directly, some migrants understand this as a ‘norm’ in Australia or among Australians. A Fijian male irregular migrant said: ‘We work with white people so for me it was normal [to hear abusive terms]. Just to work, you say some words, but I understand that’s how it goes’.

Experiencing precariousness as well as racism at work in the horticultural industry, many participants said that if possible, they would like to find a different job other than casual farm work. While neither the irregular migrants nor the seasonal workers had legal options to find other work, settlers were legally free to choose any jobs. However, as presented in the following section, many research participants struggle to find jobs in other sectors due to their racialisation as farm workers. One pathway to securing a more stable and better income within the horticultural sector, which some Pacific settlers in the region took, was to become a contractor.

Until the Labour Hire Licensing Act 2018 (Vic) commenced its operation at the end of April 2019, there was no mandatory licensing scheme for labour hiring companies, which meant that anyone could become a contractor. One of the largest labour hiring companies in Sunraysia, which hires workers for almond orchards, was established by a Tongan family who initially overstayed their visas. Once they regularised their visas, they started bringing their family members from Tonga, and eventually grew into a multi-million-dollar company. Most of the Tongan workers in the town are employed by this company, thus some people say the head of the family is like a member of the ‘royal family’ or is ‘king’ of the town within the Tongan community.

Contractors can increase their income surprisingly fast. For example, Tevita, another Tongan contractor who employs irregular migrants and settlers of various ethnicities from the Pacific and Asia, proudly described how quickly he had made money. Two years before he was interviewed, he started working as a contractor and within four months, he was able to move from a caravan park to a ‘small one bedroom flat’ and a few months later to ‘a five bedroom-house’. By the time of his interview, he owned several brand-new vehicles and was trying to buy a house. He admitted that he managed this by extracting significant margins from the workers, but also criticised some of the farmers he had encountered, who he described as ‘cunning, really bad’ and who were paying workers below the minimum wage.

While Tevita’s business is growing, and there are certainly financially successful Pacific contractors working in the sector, many others who try are forced to give up. Sita, mentioned at the beginning of this article, is one example; she and her husband tried to start a labour hiring business but it was not successful because they could not navigate the paperwork and all the other aspects involved. Another Tongan settler we met during fieldwork also attempted to run a labour hiring business, but she and her husband received a lot of pressure from her family members to pay them well and they went into debt. Although some Pacific contractors may ‘exploit’ their compatriots, often utilising existing hierarchical relationships,¹² for others their kinship networks and other community expectations prevent them from taking the margins from workers that would enable them to become ‘successful’ contractors.

Many Pacific participants agreed that it is better to develop trusting employment relationships with farmers directly without relying on contractors, as they have found their jobs are increasingly becoming precarious since the arrival of the contractors. It is indeed ironic that some people think that becoming a contractor might be the only viable way out of a precarious existence as a worker who is unlikely to find other employment outside the sector, as presented in the following section.

Implications of racialisation in and beyond farmwork

It has been well established that temporary migrant workers in the horticultural sector in Australia experience precariousness, but as we have shown, Pacific Islanders who have settled in regional Australia and are no longer temporary migrants share that experience, including across the generations. While a small number of Pacific people living in regional areas have become successful contractors and a small number of people have found work outside the sector, most continue their struggle to find employment beyond highly casualised farmwork. We argue that racialised demand for certain types of farm workers, combined with racism towards Islanders more broadly, prevents many Pacific settlers and even their Australian born children from finding jobs outside the horticultural sector (Nishitani and Lee 2017, 2022). This is further exacerbated by existing minority ethnic networks that control access to employment. As a Tongan male settler said: ‘banks, post office, it’s all owned by the Italians and Greek … It’s already set up by them … “Why do you work here?” “It’s because John is my nephew”. There’s no Islanders there. Can’t get in [as a worker].’

The racialisation of farm work is a wide-spread phenomenon in settler colonial countries and beyond. The recruitment of Latinos in the US and of Caribbean and Mexican workers in Canada has historically been informed and shaped by racialised hierarchies of workers in the labour market and is shaped by racialised perceptions of these workers (Binford and Preibisch 2013; Holmes 2013; Maldonado 2009; Rogaly 2020). Waldinger and Lichter (2003, 8) argued that ‘(i)n a racialized society like the United States, entire ethnic groups are ranked according to sets of socially meaningful but arbitrary traits; these rankings determine fitness for broad categories of jobs’. The historical relevance of the practice of taking people from the Pacific to endure forced labour on Australian farms, known as ‘blackbirding’, has been discussed in the context of the Seasonal Worker Programme (Connell 2010; Petrou and Connell 2018, 2023; Stead 2019, 2021a). Stead (2019) demonstrates the historical relevance of blackbirding for contemporary Pacific labour mobility in Australia. Since the introduction of temporary migration schemes, ‘Pacific Islander workers are promoted to farmers (through labour hire company and government marketing) as well-suited to horticultural labour’ (Stead 2019, 145). A similar discourse can be found in local media: ‘Unlike Australian and backpacker employees, workers from the Pacific are accustomed to tough manual labour in rural areas and have the mental and physical stamina needed to undertake the work’ (Shepparton News 2017). The representation of Pacific people as hardworking, strong farmworkers was often discussed in research interviews. A Tongan settler woman said:

They [Australians] know that we are hard-working people, but I think they meant in the farm. I think that’s … I don’t know, but the stereotyping: ‘Oh, she is a Pacific Islander, she’s really good at picking fruits’.

Indeed, many participants questioned why people from the Pacific Island countries cannot access the Working Holiday Visa, which allows people to move freely and find jobs as they wish, whereas both the Seasonal Worker Programme and Pacific Labour Scheme (and now the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme) are tied to employers and the participants of the scheme cannot choose their employers. As this Tongan male settler says:

Why are they giving the Pacific Island [countries] to come in and work [as] seasonal worker in this country, same as in New Zealand. Why? [People in the] Pacific islands, they have smart knowledge. Why are they giving seasonal workers [Programme] for the Pacific Islands, and they give [working holiday] visa for other countries? What’s the difference? … They all know the Pacific Islanders, they are hard working people. That’s why they’re giving them … For me it’s like they look down on Pacific Islanders … Give the hard work to the island people to come and stand in the sun.

In addition to the inequality of access to visas, the racialised image of Pacific ‘farmworkers’ impacts not only migrants from the Pacific Islands but also people in the diaspora communities. Pacific settlers say that this ‘stigma’ of ‘farmworkers' or ‘fruit pickers’ prevents them from finding other jobs even after regularising their migration statuses (Nishitani and Lee 2022). For example, an Australian-born Tongan woman talked about her father, who used to have an irregular migrant status:

After he did get his paper [permanent residency], he was still picking … because he had no other choice. I think it’s really a stigma for every Pacific Islander. It’s usually Pacific Islanders in Mildura or Robinvale that stick to picking. There’s not much people from the Pacific Islands that you see that are working in an office or doing a job that’s got aircon in the house or in the room, or having a desk and a computer to work on. That’s really, really rare.

This experience resonates with those of racialised farmworkers in other countries. Maldonado’s research on the tree fruit and vegetable industry in Washington (2009), for example, identified highly segregated workplaces that were hierarchically organised by race/ethnicity as well as gender. Latino workers were concentrated at the lowest end of the jobs as fruit pickers, while managerial and office jobs were held by white/ Anglo workers (Maldonado 2009, 1022; and see Holmes 2013).

In our research, even participants who did not have any visa problems and had skills and work experience before arriving in the region, struggled to find other jobs. Lita, a Tongan female settler, used to have a professional job in Sydney but had to move to Mildura because her mother wanted her to join her. She did not want to work on farm and initially believed that she could find a job, given her previous experience. She moved to Mildura in 1994 and she finally found a job in 2014, experiencing 20 years of unemployment because she did not want to do casual farmwork. Lita explained:

Sometimes I have the idea maybe because of the race, who I am as a Polynesian, as a Pacific Islander. I was really qualified and I had the skills … but just being turned away. Most of the work that I’ve applied for didn’t have any chance of having an interview. I was just straight up being told thank you for applying but you’re not suitable for any job. Was very frustrating … I was trying to do other courses so I can get my foot [in the door] to paid work. I’ve done a certificate 2 in community services and tried to get into some work in an area but I couldn’t.

The difficulty of finding a job outside the horticultural sector is not only experienced by migrants but also their children. James, a 19-year-old Cook Islander who was born and raised in Mildura, was looking for a job after completing year 12 and when invited for a job interview, he encountered the racism typically inflicted on job applicants who ‘sound local’ because they have grown up in Australia yet are discriminated against on the basis of racial stereotypes. James said:

When I look for heaps of jobs and then they sound happy on the phone … But then when I go to the place and they see what I look like. Like Islander, and my skin … yeah probably my skin … But that’s what I feel like. Sometimes when they look at my skin and my … I’m an Islander, they go like, ‘Oh’, they act like, ‘oh yeah, we want you for this job’ but like they don’t really wanna … Like, they sound happy on the phone but when we come there they don’t really sound happy. Like they didn’t want us. Or they go, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were Islander’. Because I don’t really sound like … My family don’t really sound like Islanders on the phone.

James’s experience supports Maldonado’s (2009, 1032) insight that second generation members of a racialised group still experience racialisation and racism in the labour market, which constrains their employment opportunities.

In addition to the stereotype of ‘farmworkers’, many research participants raised the issues of criminalised images of Pacific people and their low social economic status as barriers in their employment search. At a focus group with second-generation Tongans, one participant said:

We’re known to be people who can’t be trusted, just because of our class, gangs, violences … we’re not educated, we didn’t finish school, we’re known to be pickers … It’s hard because we try to make it there. Even though our photo is not in our resume, but our name says it all … They can’t employ you, they can’t pronounce your names. They rather get someone whose name is easier to call and [they’re] not scared of.

Most of the Tongan and Cook Islander students who participated in interviews and focus groups indicated that the ‘stigma’ of ‘fruit-pickers’ and other negative stereotypes had impacted them. During a focus group session, Cook Islander high school students said:

They think we work in the farm. (male 17)

They think we pick grapes. (male 16)

[When] we don’t do schoolwork and we muck around, they’ll be like, ‘Oh, you’re going to end up in the grape farm, grapevine back in the farm or something’. [Teachers say] ‘If you don’t use your brains, you’re going to end up in the farms’. (male 17)

Increasingly, Pacific youth are seeking employment outside the horticultural industry. A 16-year-old Fijian female student said: ‘We’re trying to prove that we’re not just farmworkers’. Many are determined to break out of the racialised pathways that have been imposed on Pacific people in this regional area, but in doing so they encounter numerous barriers. Some young people indicated the stereotype of ‘farmworker’ affected their self-confidence, and as we have shown, they face racism within the wider community and some employers simply will not consider them for positions. With the constant influx of seasonal workers from Pacific Island states they are encountering a strengthening of the stereotypes portraying them as best suited to hard physical work on farms, adding another challenge to their attempts to shed the ‘fruit-picker’ label.

Conclusion

This paper has explored the experiences of Pacific people in Victoria who have settled in Australia and undertake horticultural work. Pacific farmworkers have a range of visa and residency statuses in Australia: they are not only participants in the temporary labour migration scheme that is designed as guestworker scheme but they also include Australian citizens and irregular migrants in casual employment on farms, and all experience some degree of precariousness. Many studies of migrant work have demonstrated the important role of legal status in producing inequality and precariousness in employment with specific migration policies and visa regulations increasing workers’ vulnerability to exploitation (e.g. Anderson 2010 in the UK; Goldring, Berinstein, and Bernhard 2009; Goldring and Landolt 2022 in Canada; Boese et al. 2013 in Australia). Others have highlighted the role of changes in the political economy of horticulture as drivers of the vulnerability of migrant workers in this sector (e.g. Rogaly 2008 on the UK; Van den Broek et al. 2019 on Australia). Focusing on Pacific Islanders in regional Victoria, we have drawn attention to experiences of precariousness for workers who are often ignored in analyses of precarious horticultural work and are at opposite ends of the spectrum of migrant status, namely irregular migrants and permanent residents or Australian citizens.

Our research demonstrates how precarious employment conditions in horticultural work impact Pacific people across and beyond different legal statuses, challenging the notion of a clear correlation between irregularity and precariousness. Contrary to other studies that found Australian citizens and permanent residents experienced better employment conditions (Underhill and Rimmer 2016), our research shows that even those Pacific people who hold Australian citizenship or permanent residency experience wage theft through under- and non-payment of wages as well as health and safety risks. Our findings also draw attention to the ways in which racism and racialisation further erode differences emanating from different legal statuses. Pacific people who are Australian citizens, permanent residents and irregular status migrants all experience racism at work. For the latter, poor employment conditions are often exacerbated, but even those participating in formal temporary worker schemes are experiencing precariousness through underpayment, excessive deductions and poor health and safety conditions, leading some to become irregular migrants to escape the dependency on exploitative employer sponsors and problems with employers. Following a decision of the Fair Work Commission in late 2021, from April 2022 a minimum wage has been introduced for horticultural workers who are currently paid on a piece rate. While this may alleviate the situation of the Pacific workers under the temporary migration scheme, it is highly unlikely to be applied to irregular migrants due to their lack of access to rights protection. Although the degrees of precariousness differ across different migrant statuses, differences in migrant status do not explain these experiences of precariousness and racism sufficiently, nor do analyses of the political economy of horticultural work.

During the COVID-19 pandemic and its resultant border closures, the Pacific guest workers could not repatriate, staying extensively in Australia, while the number of working holiday makers working on farms declined, which resulted in the heightened significance of the Pacific workers (Barry, Azeredo, and Balle-Bowness 2023). The Labor government elected in 2022 has announced a plan for ‘building a stronger and more united Pacific family’ (DFAT 2022) and proposed various changes to the Pacific guest worker scheme, including the pathway to permanent residency and an option for family accompaniment.¹³ While legal regulations may change in the future, ‘racialisation’ of work itself is difficult to change in reality.

Our findings suggest that the racialisation of Pacific people significantly shapes their experience in and beyond horticultural employment. The experience of precariousness of Pacific people with New Zealand passports who can migrate to and live in Australia freely, and of the children of Pacific migrants who are born and raised in Australia, and their struggle in finding jobs outside the horticultural sector, demonstrate that there are other factors at play that are largely neglected in analyses focusing on either migrant status or the political economy of the horticultural sector. The prevalent stereotype of Pacific people as ‘hard-working and reliable farmworkers’, in combination with the racism and racialisation they encounter at work and in the wider community, both normalise their exploitation and restrict their opportunities as jobseekers outside the horticultural sector in rural Australia. These findings resonate with analyses of the role of racialisation in the horticultural sector in Canada (Binford and Preibisch 2013) and evidence on the impacts of racialisation beyond the first generation of Latino/a farmworkers in the US (Maldonado 2009).

Finally, we found that the co-existence of Pacific Islanders on different points on the migrant or residency status spectrum shapes the local political economy of Pacific labour migration in Sunraysia. While not being able to find jobs outside the sector, some Pacific settlers choose to become contractors to increase their opportunities and to attempt to stabilise their income within their limited options; some fail and others have been successful. Furthermore, the unmet needs of seasonal workers, who bear the brunt of the deficits of the programme such as the lack of pastoral care, and the unreliable work and exploitation, are often picked up by Pacific settlers who live and work in the same location, many of whom are casual farmworkers themselves. While dealing with their own experiences of precariousness at work, settlers play an important role in supporting workers who are experiencing even more precarious conditions, including irregular migrants and seasonal workers. To understand Pacific people’s experiences of persistent precariousness, it is important to look beyond migrant statuses and industry-specific employment conditions and understand how their racialisation as ‘farmworkers’ impacts their employment experiences within and beyond the horticultural sector.

Acknowledgements

The project had two partner organisations: Sunraysia Mallee Ethnic Communities Council (SMECC) and Mallee Sports Assembly (MSA) and the Partner Investigator from SMECC was its Executive Officer, Dean Wickham. We would like to thank all research participants, who have generously shared their experiences of living and working in regional Victoria. We also appreciate the contributions of the members of the Pacific Islander Advisory Group who guided the fieldwork.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by La Trobe University under grants from the Research Focus Area Transforming Human Societies (2014–2018 and 2018–2019) and by the Australian Research Council (LP150100385, 2015–2019).

Notes

1 All the names appearing in this article are pseudonyms to protect research participants’ privacy.

2 Working Holiday Makers are temporary visa holders who are allowed to work during their stay.

3 Ethics approval for the project was granted by La Trobe University Human Ethics Committee (HEC15-107).

4 Campbell and Price distinguish the notion of precariousness in employment which can be circumscribed by ‘poor job quality’ from the notion of precarious workers which describes ‘persons not just engaged in precarious work but also enduring the necessary consequences of precariousness’ (2016 drawing on Anderson 2010, 303–304).

5 At the time of the research, there were two separate schemes for workers from the Pacific: the Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP), which began in 2012 (after a prior trial programme between 2009 and 2012), and the Pacific Labour Scheme (PLS), introduced in 2018. These schemes bring workers from Timor-Leste and nine countries in the Pacific (PNG, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Nauru, Fiji, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Samoa and Tonga) for a period between six and nine months for SWP in horticulture and agriculture sectors or up to three years for PLS in rural and regional Australia. From April 2022, they have been consolidated into the PALM scheme. In this article, we refer to the SWP as that is the scheme existing at the time of the research, through which some of our participants were employed.

6 Although research has pointed out how these strict regulations cause further precariousness for seasonal workers (Stead 2021a; Petrou and Connell 2018), the new PALM scheme inherits the same regulation and workers continue to be tied to their employers (Stead 2021b).

7 Two of the authors are connected to Tongan families and have conducted research with Tongans over many years. All three authors have conducted extended periods of fieldwork with migrant workers in regional Australia. Pacific Islanders are a key group of these workers, especially since the temporary labour schemes were introduced.

8 While ‘undocumented migrants’ is a more common term for those who stay in Australia ‘unlawfully’ (in the Australian government’s term), we refer to people who overstay their visitor visas as ‘irregular migrants’. Most of the migrants with irregular migration statuses we met carry a huge amount of ‘documentation’ and records of communications with the immigration office in Australia in order to try to regularise their visas. Therefore, they are not ‘undocumented’.

9 Some diaspora communities conducted their own investigations about the Seasonal Worker Programme. For example, in 2017, when the Australian Parliament held the inquiry into the Modern Slavery Act, the Tonga Australian Seasonal Workers Association was formed by diaspora community members in Sydney and submitted a significant amount of evidence that showed exploitative conditions of seasonal workers in Australia (Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade 2017). According to its President, all the costs for investigations, such as travel costs, were paid at their own expense without any external funding (conversation with the then President in 2017).

10 While in the new PALM-scheme launched in 2022, contact details of key diaspora community organisations and liaison officers from each country are listed for workers and employers, the 2019 version of the pre-departure guidebook provided only contact details of the Fair Work Ombudsman and SWP Information line that could be used to report employers’ breaches (SWP 2019), which were unlikely to be used by workers to raise their voices in fear of losing the opportunity to come back (see also Howe et al. 2020).

11 In the forementioned predeparture guidebook, it has the following warning. ‘If you break any of your visa conditions, it will not only harm your chances of returning to Australia in the next season but it may also affect other seasonal workers from your country. You will also lose the opportunity to provide income for you and your family’ (Seasonal Worker Programme 2019, 5)

12 There was an incident in which labour hiring business owned by a Tongan family was reported for not paying superannuation for seasonal workers for several years. Due to the hierarchical relationship established between the employer and Tongan workers, no Tongan seasonal workers reported the issue. The problem was revealed only when a complaint was made by Fijian seasonal workers, who are ‘outside’ of the Tongan hierarchical relationships.

13 In order to ‘create permanent migration pathways and to grow the Pacific diaspora in Australia’, a new visa category ‘Pacific Engagement Visa’ will start in July 2023, which involves a ballot process across Pacific countries to provide up to 3,000 visas per year (PALM Scheme 2022a, 4). The latest update, on the 22nd of December 2022, states that family accompaniment is only possible for long-term PALM workers who have ‘the agreement of their employer’ (PALM Scheme 2022b, 1, emphasis in original), so this is not yet possible for seasonal workers.