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This is the Daily OS. Oh, now it makes sense. Good morning, and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Friday, the eighteenth of July. I'm Billy fitz.
Simon's I'm Sam Kazluski.
If you're a young person who's worked in retail, hospitality or other casual jobs, you're probably wondered at some point whether you are not being paid fairly. Now, new research from the University of Melbourne suggests your suspicions are correct. A major study surveying nearly three thousand young workers has found that one in three have likely been underpaid. Even when you account for junior rates, the findings are stuck.
Around ten percent of workers were paid just ten dollars an hour or less, more than half weren't paid over time they were entitled to, and one in five weren't paid for work they're done. It doesn't stop there. Young workers told researchers they are forbidden from taking breaks, forced to complete unpaid trial shifts, and even being paid in
the form of food instead of money. At the heart of it is a lack of education and awareness about rights at work, and a lack of leverage to push back to help us understand these findings and their implications for young workers across Australia. Sam was joined on today's podcast by Tom Dillon, research fellow at the Center for Employment and Labor Relations Law at the University of Melbourne, who co authored this new report. We'll get to that chat just after a quick message from our sponsor.
Tom.
Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast this morning.
Oh my pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
The first question I wanted to ask you about this work that you've been doing is whether you framed low pay to the subjects of your survey as a perception and a feeling or as a standard.
There's a few sort of ways to sort of conceptualize that. The survey insisted of a number of questions which sort of asked different things and with slightly different criteria. By and large, it could be characterized as a feeling or an opinion insofar as we didn't require production of evidence for the respondent's conclusions. The questions were really just geared around asking respondents about their perceptions of exploitation or their experiences in the workplace.
And so what you essentially found was about one in three young people are feeling exploited or feeling underpaid. What does that look like in practice?
Yeah, well, unfortunately, in part it speaks for itself. There's a number of alarming statistics that do arise from the survey. As for what it looks like, I think that really requires sort of a bit of a think about the broader picture. And to that end, we did find that forty three percent had been required to complete work without additional pay right or complete additional work without pay. But further to that is also a number of other things which flow on not just from under payments, but also
other poor experiences. So for example, thirty six percent being forbidden to take breaks they were entitled to, thirty five percent having their timeshit hours reduced by their employer, twenty four percent not being paid superannuation, and just under ten percent receiving food or products in lieu of money.
And that last stat really alarms me, as to did the stat that one in ten workers reported being paid ten dollars an hour or less. That's less than half the minimum wage. So I guess my question with that is how, I mean, let's take that and the food in lieu of payment in one how are employers getting away with this kind of thing.
Really, it's sort of the result of it a number of things. Young workers in employment relationships, they encounter power and balances that are sort of inherent within them. Beyond that, we also can that young workers are less likely to sort of be informed of their rights.
Whose job do you think that is? Whose job is it to inform them?
I would consider it to be a matter for regulatory authorities. And that follows on to some of the conclusions we made in the report where we really implored the regulators to promote themselves and educate young workers, while also allowing those young workers to see that the regulators can be there to help them and that they do have those statutory functions.
Because it's an interesting point you raise, right in terms of the statutory functions, the way that the law is set out, the structures in place, particularly for casual employment, might have something to answer for here as well. Is the actual environment and rules that everyone's playing by aren't actually fair? Do you think that that's a fair characterization.
Yeah, Well, a real difficulty with part of the legal framework as I see it, is sort of a lack of concrete sort of easily referable standards and limitations. What it states is that an employer can't ask an employee
to work additional hours that are unreasonable. But in reality, a seventeen year old at a fast food chain will have real difficulty enforcing something like that, because it's already hard enough to come to a supervisor airing a grievance, let alone, when all you have behind you is a indefinite legal right that might on might not protect you, and that might be a matter for a court to decide, and it makes it really difficult and contributes to the problem in my view.
And a discussion with your employer about what the word reasonable means and doesn't mean with power imbalance out there in the open playing out, and another area I found myself thinking of that particular dynamic in your research was around this idea of you mentioned workers said that they lacked leverage to negotiate, and I think that that's another you know, what does leverage actually mean to a young employee is very different?
Yeah, absolutely, you know, And you think there's definitely circumstances where employees in the workforce can have leverage over employers, but a lot of the time that will only occur when it's a very high skilled senior employee with a lot of desirable and rare skills.
Yeah.
An issue that confronts a lot of the young workers is that, you know, just by nature of being so young, a lot of the jobs they can pick up are in retail or in fast food things like that, and in some respects the skills are replaceable in that the employers at least consider that a lot of other people can do them, and that really undermines any leverage that or the minimal leverage that a teenager might have in the workplace.
Anyway, can you give me a sense of one level of detail beneath this idea of young people, and if there's any particular differences in gender, in cultural and linguistic diversity, any socioeconomic drivers. Perhaps of the people who responded by saying that they felt underpaid.
Yeah, absolutely, And part of the survey results that we were concerned with was identifying factors like that, and we arrived at the conclusion that there are a number of characteristics that do affect and that did bear out in the survey. Some of those being non males, were more likely to report exploitation, as were people with a disability.
The same was true of non permanent residents, so say temporary visa holders, and also having a preferred language other than English, and those in addition to the precarious working arrangements as well. So there are all things which we found to be consistent or indicative of greater likelihoods of exploitation or mistreatment.
I've got two more questions for you, Tom, and I kind of want to bring this into kind of right here today on Friday. If you could give one recommendation to a policy maker, what would that be? But also I'm keen to hear your thoughts on if you could give one recommendation to a young person listening who might feel as though they are in the kind of situation that you're describing, what's one piece of advice for them as well.
So as for policymakers, we did provide six recommendations at the conclusion of the report. I think one that I'm particularly interested in, and that might sort of be more of a legislative thing than an in practice thing, would be consideration of the inclusion of something called a loaded rate. So, in short, a loaded rate is pretty much an hourly
rate which tries to anticipate and encapsulate penalty rates. So say if someone was paid one hundred dollars an hour at a at nighttime and fifty during the day, the loaded rate would be seventy five.
Right.
So I am partial to that recommendation because I think, as the survey showed, there's so many young people that aren't paid these penalty rates and that aren't paid the appropriate amounts, and I think one potentially quite clean way to do that would be to introduce a loaded rate which accounts for them, such that employers in some respects wouldn't have a choice about whether to pay or not
to pay the appropriate rate. As for the young workers themselves, I would really recommend them to familiarize themselves to the best extent they can with their workplace rights. I think it's so easy to sort of just go to work and not think too much about them and assume that, especially a large employer, is going to do the right thing,
but unfortunately we found that's not the case. The Fair Work Umbertsmen publishes a lot of resources online which are meant for audiences of all ages and competencies, and I think even getting across some basic ones like entitlements to be paid more on public holidays, and when you may or may not be entitled to overtime, how often you
should get breaks at work, even things like that. I think the most important thing is these young workers recognizing they have these rights and that's the first step to enforcing them and making sure that they can be fulfilled and they do bear out in practice.
Tom, thanks for joining us on the Daily os this morning.
Fain a pleasure.
Thank you so much for having me such a fascinating chat, and thank you so much for listening to today's podcast. We'll be back this afternoon with the headlines, but until then, have a great day.
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung Kalkuttin woman from Gadighl 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 Straight Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.