Agricultural Labour In Australia Part 1: Struggles On the Farm
Giacomo Bianchino
09/10/2021
This article is part of a series of pieces on the state of agricultural labour in the Australian economy. Giacomo Bianchino has been researching the severity of exploitation on Australian farms, its basis in changes to the supply and regulatory structure of agriculture, and the efforts of groups to organise in the farmworker space. This article focuses on the direct experience of farm labourers in the Mid-North Coast of New South Wales. Names have been changed to protect the privacy of interview subjects.
What goes on behind the farm gate? Australia prides itself on the quality of its agricultural produce, and the domestic consumer has come to expect an extremely high standard of fruit, vegetables and livestock at the point of sale. But before it arrives on the consumer’s table, every last piece has gone through an extremely complex supply chain mostly shrouded in secrecy.
The truth is that the majority of labour on Aussie fruit farms is conducted by the most vulnerable kind of workforce. Pickers and packers in horticulture are either migrant workers on temporary labour visas, refugees on bridging visas, or undocumented workers operating outside their visa restrictions.
When Molly was growing up in the South-Sudanese community in Coffs Harbour, work on the fruit farms was a part of everyday life. “Most people, when they think of farming in Australia, picture a white man with a hat and a piece of grass sticking out of his mouth. People don’t realise that the tomatoes or potatoes they are eating have all passed through black or brown hands.”
Molly’s parents worked long hours picking blueberries and bananas for local farmers. As she puts it, language barriers and the categorisation of labour into “skilled” and “unskilled” make finding a decent job extremely difficult for families like her own, who arrived in Australia as refugees fleeing conflict in South Sudan. When she was 12, she started spending her weekends helping out. Her memories of the farm are filled with anecdotes of demeaning and illegal labour practices. On one occasion, the farmer’s wife told her and her sister to drink from the tap used for the farm dogs.
The racism of the situation was not lost on her. “I remember thinking: ‘Am I really standing here after all this history?’ Me, my auntie, my uncle, my sister, wearing the cheapest white t-shirt and taking orders where to pick and what to do with it.”
Since Molly worked on the farms, conditions have changed. On one hand, the role of labour-hire contractors and intermediaries has interposed a buffer between the farmer and the worker. This was examined in the infamous Four Corners special on Australian slavery back in 2015. But despite the efforts of journalists, union officials and legal groups to expose the malpractice of contractors, the exploitation continues today.
The age of fruit pickers is still great cause for concern. Asmarina, a local high-school student and member of the Coffs Harbour Eritrean refugee community, performed similar work on regional farms at a similar age. In her community, “there is a high majority of people working on the farms.” Refugees with degrees in their home country find barriers to Australian employment and end up picking on the farms. From the age of 11, this included Asmarina herself. She recalls going out to the farms on which her parents worked and being asked to work alongside them. Cash was paid in an envelope, employers were aggressive and the entire atmosphere was “unsettling.” But the job is still “easy cash” for many who struggle to find other work.
So attractive is the “easy cash” that people travel from far away to work on the farms in Coffs. Towards the end of 2020, Wollongong local Daisy responded to a Facebook ad sponsored by the Australian federal government. It mentioned that workers on the scheme could receive up to $6000 for relocation costs and earn farm wages on top of that. Daisy responded and was put in touch with a labour hire contractor. They made their way up the coast and by December found themselves working on farms run by the Aladdin Rocks Group.
On an average day, Daisy earned four dollars for every kilo of blueberries they picked. One of the supervisors on the farm has since formed his own labour contracting company; in his contract for new employees he stipulates that one would have to pick 6 kilos to make more than minimum wage. In reality, the average rate of picking is about 3.5 kilos in an hour. Only extremely skilled pickers are able to earn anything close to minimum wage.
This raises a huge question about the very structure of farmworker remuneration in Australia. Piece rates are illegal in most Australian industries, because of the general acknowledgement of how such arrangements can facilitate underpayment and unfair treatment. But piece rates are not only legal in Australian horticulture: they are the dominant mode of payment. The reasons for the exceptions made in a single industry are vague and, ultimately, political- and will be examined in later articles.
But even outside of legal requirements, farmers and contractors manipulate the system to intensify worker exploitation. The rates per kilo are often changed daily without the re-signing of contracts. In fact, some contractors are now pushing for their workers to go out and get Australian Business Numbers so they can be paid as contractors rather than employees, even though there is no legal setting in Australia that allows an individual contractor to pick fruit.
This isn’t lost on workers. As Daisy mentioned, there is nearly constant antagonism between the full-time farmworkers, contractors, and the temporary hired labour. Contractors will be delegated certain patches of field to work on by the farmworkers – often the part with the least growth. This affects the amount the contracted workers can earn, and often leads to walk-offs or confrontations. On the other hand, the contractor themselves may change the pay rate without telling the workers.
Any organising on the job can lead to immediate sacking. One of Daisy’s anecdotes of work on the farm includes one supervisor who tried to take the side of the workers. When someone told the boss that he had been listening to workers’ concerns, the contractor asked him not to come back.
“The temporary migrant workforce, then, has vulnerability written into their employment arrangement”
The control that contractors have over the fate of labourers is even more intense for workers who come to Australia on any of the Temporary Migrant Labour schemes currently in operation. Workers in the Pacific Labour Scheme, Seasonal Workers Program or Working Holiday Maker program are very rarely able to find work on farms without the intercession of labour hire firms. As Dr. Basil Leodoro, President of the Vanuatu Association of Public Service Employees explained to me, these firms operate a kind of blacklist for workers who act up.
“We’ve had countless reports of that. There are a few union leaders who have managed to overcome that. But, you know, a lot of it is targeted at the first-timers so they threaten them with blacklisting, just because they don't want them to organise.”
Migrant workers in Australia have a host of reasons to organise that separate them from permanent residents like Molly or Daisy. The Seasonal Workers Program (SWP), launched in 2018, has become increasingly popular since then in places like Coffs Harbour. Many Pacific Island workers are now living at local hostels or in (fairly expensive) shared accommodation, ferried to farms each morning by hostel vehicles or inconspicuous white vans. The SWP, as well as the Pacific Labour Scheme, binds workers to their employer, making it nearly impossible for people to withdraw from bad situations. When employers force them to work extreme hours, reduce their pay, or expose them to harmful chemicals, they have very few options. Dr. Leodoro itinerated the two major responses of Ni-Vanuatu workers:
“They do two things: they fight or they flight. I think that's translated into what we're seeing with workers absconding from their place of work. There's been quite a few reports of workers not turning up to work - workers absconding. I think that's their way of protesting the conditions that they have, and, and you know, in this COVID climate, their way of saying they miss home, and they'd rather not do anything than work even more.”
It is these absconsions that can get a farmworker on a blacklist, preventing them from ever returning to Australia. Rather than risk that, many put up with the terrible conditions. The temporary migrant workforce, then, has vulnerability written into their employment arrangement.
The situation is even worse for the nearly 60,000 undocumented workers that are estimated to be currently employed in Australian agriculture. These workers, given their restrictions, form the majority of workers on many Australian farms. They are generally workers who have come over on legitimate tourist visas and breached their conditions in order to earn money; or overstayed their legitimate temporary migrant labour visa. There are also those on Bridging visas whose working rights are ambiguous (in fact, some employers will encourage those on holiday visas to apply for refugee status once they are in the country).
These workers are obviously the most vulnerable in terms of both their rights and the possibilities for their exploitation. Terrible living conditions and long work hours are paired with singular abuses, including farmers or contractors taking passports and forcing workers into relations of sexual bondage. The situation is so bad that some compare it to the Kafala system of migrant worker surveillance in certain Gulf States.
Undocumented workers are unlikely to come forward because of the fragility of their situation, and because of the amount of misinformation about their legal status spread by employers. Across all three groups of workers (permanent resident, temporary migrant labourer and undocumented worker), there is an informational gap. Very few people working in horticulture and agriculture generally understand that they are allowed to unionise, or even what the award wages are in their field. As Asmarina tells me, “people don’t know their legal rights on these farms.”
It is in this context that CUDL and the ACP generated our farmworkers pamphlet, which lays out the basic rights of people in the industry. It has now made its way into the hands of union officials both in Australia and Vanuatu, and has been shared widely online. This is the first step towards rectifying these criminal exploitative conditions that target some of the most vulnerable in our society.
The above is a snapshot of conditions for Australian farmworkers in 2021. What is missing from many contemporary reports on these issues, however, is both the deep structural and historical reasons for this situation, and the efforts being undertaken to change it. In the next articles, I’ll examine how and why we are in this situation, and how people are starting to try to change that reality.
If you have information or issues relating to farmwork in Australia, or want to get involved in the campaign to improve worker’s rights and the power of the working class, contact us at:
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Email: coffsharbour@cudl.org.au