My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung Calkotin woman from Gadigl Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
Good morning, Ann, Welcome to the Daily OS. It's Thursday, the second of November.
I'm Sam, I'm Emma Gillespie. I'm the deputy editor here at the Daily OS.
Nice to have you on m It feels like almost every few weeks that a different underpayment story hits the headlines. This week, a lawsuit was launched against supermarket chain Aldi for allegedly underpaying workers up to one hundred and fifty million dollars. There's even the story this week about an underpayment issue in the Federal Department of Employment and Workplace Relations and they're the body responsible for ensuring payment conditions
are met in the public service. In today's deep dive, Emma will sit down with the new Fair Work omitsman and a booth and she's the person charged with monitoring, investigating and enforcing Australia's workplace laws. And they're going to discuss why under payments happen from small businesses but all the way through to multinational giants. We're going to get to that interview in just a second, but first, Emma, what is making her lines this morning?
A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces has defended a decision to strike the Jibalia refugee camp in Gaza, where the spokesperson said a senior Hamas commander and dozens of Hamas forces were hiding. The Hamas run Gaz and Health Ministry says at least fifty people were killed in the strike and that the total death toll in Gaza is over eight thousand, five hundred. Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinkoln will return to the region tomorrow to continue negotiations.
Australia's High Court has ruled that convicted terrorist Abdul na Sir Ben Rica's citizenship should be restored. In a decision handed down yesterday, six of the High Court's seven judges ruled the Australian government was unable to strip Benbricker of his citizenship. A move taken by then Home Affairs Minister Peter Duddon. In twenty twenty PM Anthony Abernezi said his government will consider the implications of the decision.
The International Monetary Fund says national inflation is still too high and has recommended the Reserve Bank continue to lift interest rates in Australia as well as introduce further government measures to limit inflation. The RBA will meet next Tuesday for its monthly cash rate meeting, with experts tipping a rate rise to a twelve year high of four point three five percent. Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers said the independent IMF report supports the government's strategy.
And today's good news. A recycling scheme offering a ten cent refund for recycled drink containers has launched in Victoria. Most aluminium, glass, plastic and liquid drink containers can be returned to reverse vending machines and over the counter sites under this new system, which is hoped to cut the amount of LISSA in the States down by half.
If it feels like you're seeing underpayment stories in the news every other week at the moment, you're not wrong. The fair work onmbardsman says that in the last year they found more than five hundred million dollars worth of underpayments. The Fair Work Onbardsmen helps Australians with things like advice, assistants, guidance for employers and employees to help us understand workplace laws. Anna Booth is the Fair Work Onbardsman and I'm throwing
her on the deep end today. Anna has been in the role as Ombardsman at Fair Work for nine weeks, but she was willing to take on all of our questions. Welcome to the podcast. Let's start off with the role of the Fair Work Ombardsman. It sounds very serious. What is it that you do and how do you know that you're doing a good job?
Oh that's two questions. So the Fairwork Combardsman is a person myself and also an organization with a thousand people, and we're the workplace regulator and we're responsible for making sure that people get the terms and conditions that they're entitled to in Australian workplaces, whether that comes from a statute like the Fair Work Act, or whether it comes from an award like the Hospitality Award, or whether it
comes from an enterprise agreement. We measure our success based on the number of people who we give assistance to and the amount of money we recover. But really our purpose is to create harmonious, cooperative, and productive and compliant workplaces, and honestly, it's a little hard to to know whether we have created that in any one year, but we hope that what we do goes towards creating workplaces where people are kind to one another.
We've seen underpayment stories in the news for years now, but as recently as this week, why do these stories keep appearing in our news cycle? Why does this keep happening?
That's a very big question, one of the big drivers. I guess on two sides, So you've got an employer with obligations to provide terms and conditions, and the one that we're most used to hearing about is pay. And then you've got employees who are entitled to receive those terms and conditions, and if you like, you know that's the essence of the work wage bargain. On the worker side,
there are lots of workers who are quite vulnerable. Young workers are particularly vulnerable, particularly young workers who are either still studying or coming into their first job, and that's because they may not know what their rights are, or they might be afraid to speak up even if they do know what their rights are and they feel they're not getting them. On the employer's side, there are lots of different drivers for underpayment. Sometimes it's just a mistake
that's happened within payroll. Sometimes it's because they don't have the proper payroll systems that capture all the work that people do and the correct pay that they should be being paid. And sometimes it's because they are deliberately underpaying so that they can either earn more profit or they can stay in business.
You've said before that it's directors and CEOs that should ultimately be the ones responsible for breaches when these companies are found to have underpaid their stuff. What does that responsibility look like?
Yeah, so, I mean that's the fundamental emma that you know, if you set up a business, even if it's a tiny little business, you have a lot of inputs, and one of those inputs is people. You've got to responsibility to know what the right rate of pay in terms and conditions are for your employee or employees, and then have the administrative systems, whether they're automatic or whether they're manual.
You still just have to have the routines to make sure that when someone comes to work, you pay them, and you pay them correctly.
In the last financial year, your team uncovered over five hundred million dollars worth of unpaid wages. That sounds like a lot of money. Is that a figure that is particularly bad worse than previous years? Where are we at in terms of progress on this issue?
Yeah, So what's really interesting is I've only been in this job. This is the kind of the middle of my ninth week on the job, and I didn't realize that the last two years, where we have recovered a billion dollars each year half a billion for workers, that that was more in the last two years than in the previous twelve years put together. And it seems like the big contributor to that is very large companies discovering
that they're not paying people correctly. And that's surprising because those companies do have the capital and the reserves to invest properly in systems, but apparently some of them haven't been.
I know it hasn't been very long into the new gig, a couple of months, but with your background in fair work and given what you've seen in the last nine weeks. Are you confident that fair Work is catching all of the breaches?
I am actually not confident that we are seeing everything there is to see. That's for sure. We are recovering a lot, but I think there probably is more to recover. And of course our prize is compliance that companies are putting the systems in place that they can find out if there are any mistakes being made. One of the biggest investments that the Farewell comferenceman makes is in education and advice. We enter into enforceable undertakings with large companies.
We put a lot of public money into verifying exactly what the underpayment has been in that particular entity, and quite often we find out that there's actually more money that needs to be paid back than the company has identified. So there's a lot of different aspects to it, but the real prize is in people not making mistakes.
The Employment Minister Tony Burke has suggested himself that most underpayments are a mistake by employers. Do you agree with that?
A piece of work done by an academic called Stephen Kliborn at the University of Sydney, where he interviewed a large number of employers that particular piece of work found of the employers interviewed that most of them were aware they were under paying. But he might have also been interviewing a particular cohort in a particular sector. So I don't want to contradict my minister. But equally I don't
want to make something up. I don't know. I can only tell you what's Stephen clever and found in his research. But in the future, if the recent legislation becomes law, we will have to find a way of forming a view about whether there's intent. Obviously, in the future we will be actually able to say what proportion of prosecutions on the basis of the acts that were intentional.
You've touched on sort of the federal government proposing to make wage theft a criminal offense. What are your thoughts on introducing some harsher, more tangible penalties for the companies and the directors responsible for underpayment. Are we talking a slap on the risk a fine? Should they face jail time?
Well, look, the Fairwork Combradceman has welcomed the increased penalties and that obviously that's a full range of penalties and in an extreme case, of criminal liability could include jail. We've welcomed it because not that we want to see necessarily people punished for punishment's sake, but we really want to see, as we discussed earlier in the interview, the landscape change. We want voluntary compliance. We want employers to be paying attention and being very careful and paying their
people correctly. And the evidence does suggest that high fines are at a terrence. What has to go with that, and i'll quote the academic Stephen Cliborn again, is to have awareness and expectation in the workplace community that there will be enforcement of those laws. If people think that they won't be caught, it wouldn't really matter how high the fine was, it won't make any difference. So it's putting the two together that are important. But certainly those
things first. The increase in penalties is welcome.
And we're seeing particular industries with higher rates of underpayment claims than others, you know, the university sect and retail, supermarkets, cafes, restaurants. These are the sectors that seem to come up in the news a lot. Why do you think that some sectors struggle with this more than others.
Yeah, there's different situations or different circumstances facing these different sectors. So you've mentioned universities. There is a very high proportion of casual academic staff teaching students in our universities, much more than you'd think, and it seems to have crept
up on us. And at the same time, universities have let local managers take charge of the employment and payment arrangements for those casuals and that has led to a high degree inconsistency and often quite serious contraventions in restaurants and cafes. The different kind of drivers, they're often small business, they are often economically challenged, they're the very high turnover of those businesses, low barriers entry, and so those things
all contribute. They lay the groundwork really for underpayments to occur.
What about young people? Are they particularly vulnerable to underpayment issues?
They really are. Our definition of young workers is fifteen to twenty four. We had five thousand anonymous calls from young workers last year and that's thirty four percent of all our anonymous reports, so they're quite prone to report anonymously. We found that thirty percent of those young workers were employed in the accommodation and food services sector, another eleven percent in construction, and they are another eleven percent in retail. And those young workers, if it is their first job,
they are often uncertain of their rights. They're often afraid to speak up because they do want to keep their job. We also want to make it clear that it is an offense to treat anyone unfairly or adversely just because they ask about their rights. My own son has had that experience on a building site many years ago when he opened his phone to find out what his order rate should be, and he happened to open the cfmu's website because he found that to be a useful place
to find out information, and he was ordered off the site. So, you know, young workers can be particularly vulnerable. They might be even you know, not wanting to go home and tell mom and dad that they've lost their job. They're an enduring priority for the Fairwork comferenceman and amongst other
vulnerable workers, we pay particular attention to them. And if there is a situation when one of our inspectors goes into a workplace and it's got a lot of young workers in it, we make it a priority to address circumstances of that employer what.
Should a worker do if they think they're being underpaid.
It's really important to find out the facts, you know, not to sort of jump in and I guess you get into a conflict before you're absolutely sure. So they can jo in a union and contact that union and the union will tell them what the right amounts are. They can come onto the Fair Work Combotsman's website, or they can use our info line thirteen thirteen ninety four and talk to somebody about it. Many many employers, no doubt, once they find out there is an error, will want
a remedy it. If that's not successful, then they can ask for more help from their union or from the Fair Work Combotsman, and we can actually do what's called a request for assistance and support them obtaining their rights.
That's all we've got time for today on the Daily OS. We'd love to hear your stories of underpayment or working conditions and you know, the experiences you're having in the workplace, because it's really important to us and that's kind of what we're here for. You can reach out to us by jumping onto our Instagram and shooting us DMP. If you enjoyed this episode, would love you to share it with a friend and give us a rating and Spotify
or Apple. We'll be back again tomorrow. Till then, have a great day,