Agricultural Labour in Australia Part 3: The Agricultural Visa and Australia in the System of World Imperialism
Giacomo Bianchino
01/12/2021
On October 3, 2021, the federal minister for Agriculture, David Littleproud, announced the details for a new “Agricultural Visa.” He framed this as a win for small Australian farmers, stating that it would “[give] our farmers a confidence to plant a crop and know that they'll be able to get it into the supply chain” [1]. Michelle O’Neill, the president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, retorted that the visa “contains many of the worst elements of previous visa programs which have resulted in systemic exploitation and mistreatment of migrant workers as well as the displacement of local jobs" [1].
The Agricultural Visa is clearly a controversial piece of legislation. It is a tailor-made solution to problems which are unique to Australian capitalist production. This article will examine the nature of the visa and the reasons for its existence, before evaluating its potential as a solution for these problems. To do so, it will also try to place Australia in the system of global imperialism.
What is the Ag Visa?
The Agricultural Visa, as planned, is an attempt to supplement the labour supply to Australian industry which has been provided since 1975 by various forms of temporary migrant labour. The three major programs currently in operation are the Working Holiday Maker (WHM) program, the Seasonal Workers Program (2009)(SWP) and the Pacific Labour Scheme (2018)(PLS). The WHM provides a 2-year visa for participant countries, contingent on the fulfilment of 88 days of farm work annually. The SWP allows for participant countries to send workers for the harvest period; generally about 5 months of the year. The PLS allows workers to stay for a maximum of 3 years.
Plans for an agricultural visa have been underway for a number of years. Deficiencies in the existing schemes include the same problem that German manufacturers discovered in the 1960s when they first started to bring over masses of Turkish migrant workers. Temporary settlement does not allow for the accrual of skills, or any continuity in the workforce as a whole. Though there is an ample workforce willing to come over each year, the volatility of the international situation (especially during COVID-19) means that farmers can’t rely on a guaranteed labour supply through the schemes.
As with many things in Australian political history, however, the real impetus came from the “Mother Country”. When the UK made its inglorious exit from Europe, all its trade deals had to be rewritten. When PM Scott Morrison went to negotiate with Boris Johnson about what this would mean for the Working Holiday Maker scheme, he met a firm British hand. In an act of adamantine will, ScoMo dropped the 88-day farm work provision, allowing British backpackers to simply apply for a second-year visa [2].
This robbed farmers of one of their favourite labour supplies. As a kind of compensation, the Federal Government agreed with the National Farmers’ Federation to introduce the Agricultural Visa. Extended to all countries in the ASEAN network, it will provide a three-year visa much like the Pacific Labour Scheme. But beyond being a mere extension of the PLS to Asia, the Ag Visa promises something new: a pathway to permanent residency. This will radically alter the structure of Australian labour migration in ways that are both positive and negative.
To understand why the visa has taken shape in the way that it has, we must look at Australia’s role in global capitalism.
Australian Agriculture in the Context of World Imperialism
In the last article, we examined the historical development of Australian agriculture. While we paid passing attention to international events like the opening up of China and the completion of the “real subsumption” in the 1970s, we still lack a picture of how Australia’s current position in the world economy affects its choice of labour supply. By turning to this question now, we can see why the Agricultural Visa is such a significant proposal.
Australia’s self-image has long been tied to its place in the imperial core. We align our interests so rigorously with Britain and America that we’ve followed them to wars which had absolutely no bearing on our security and divided our population. With the signing of AUKUS, we’ve also shown that we are willing to sacrifice our relationship with our largest trade partner to remain in thrall to the empires.
The temporary migrant worker schemes are doubly imperialist. On the one hand, the use of bonded temporary labour is a powerful tool for capitalists against the workers within Australia. On the other, the program removes skilled labour from the sender country and allows the reproduction of underdevelopment in that country
It is, in fact, our place in the core of imperialism that faces our export industry with some serious hurdles. Our “comparative advantage” over other producer-countries clearly can’t be secured through wage competition. There is a tendency to focus on capital-intensive forms of production in Australia to offset farmers’ dependencies on labour. To lower unit costs, we have to reduce the amount of labour-time embedded in our commodities. This has guided Australian specialisation into industries that can be heavily automated.
As analysed in the last article, there are certain industries which cannot fully mechanise. Horticulture is one of these.
Generally in an economy, wages are governed by the struggle between capital and labour but reliant on the maintenance of borders. The absence of free movement between economies (regulated by borders and immigration controls) puts an artificial limit on the amount of power a worker has to withhold their labour by taking it elsewhere. The difficulty of migrating into the same country, however, puts a limit on the number of workers a capitalist has access to.
In Australian horticulture, two solutions have been offered to this. On the one hand, they make use of illegal domestic labour (undocumented migrants) or workers who feel like they can’t leave the job because of the perceived lack of demand for their “low-skilled” labour. On the other hand, they rely on the use of migrant labour. Embedded into this logic is the “temporary” nature of this labour: that it will eventually return to its home country. While they are here, workers are bonded to an individual employer to restrict their mobility. As seen in the previous articles, this is another disincentive to rattle the cage.
In the official literature, the use of temporary migrant labour is framed as a win for all parties involved. Not only does it provide pliable labour to Australian capital; it allows for capital to flow back into the sender country through a “remittance” scheme by which wages are sent home. In fact, such wages are too small to actually create any kind of “entrepreneurial capital” which might be used to support the economy of those countries.
The reality is that the temporary migrant worker schemes are doubly imperialist. On the one hand, the use of bonded temporary labour is a powerful tool for capitalists against the workers within Australia. On the other, the program removes skilled labour from the sender country and allows the reproduction of underdevelopment in that country. The attrition of remittances mean that the piffling wages sent back to the home country are often spent on subsistence. What the sender country “gets” is the breakdown of its workers’ families and the loss of labour in its own economy.
To be worthy of progressive support, the Agricultural Visa will have to attend to these problems.
Strengths and Weaknesses of the Agricultural Visa
When farmers are surveyed about what they are looking for in their workforce, they rarely list hard skills or physical attributes. Rather, they want a certain “attitude:” a willingness to work and a hesitancy to rattle the cage [3]. In a word: compliance. The WHM, SWP and PLS are all structurally designed to ensure this compliance through bonding employees to single bosses and limiting the amount of time a worker spends in Australia.
The details of the visa are still somewhat unclear; however those which have been announced suggest the end of the bondage component of temporary migrant work. While there will be a list of “approved employers” from which a worker can apparently choose, they will have the ability to move between these employers [4]. This removes the barrier to domestic mobility, which could make the workforce more capable of exerting their power. It could also allow individual employers to dodge responsibility, as they have access to other workers in the scheme.
How this mobility will take shaped within an employer-sponsorship model remains unclear. There are also open questions about how capable a given worker will be of finding alternative work. We have heard reports of blacklists operating at an international level for workers who speak up about their conditions. There’s no saying whether something similar might not operate between Australian employers for troublesome workers.
The other aspect of the new visa is the pathway to permanent residency. On the one hand, this is extremely positive for the local labour movement. It provides an incentive for workers to organise and entitles them to the same protections as any other Australian worker. This will hopefully prevent any further decay in conditions or wages for agricultural workers across the continent.
It is, again, unclear as to how such a system will operate. Will workers have a guaranteed path to residency? Will these pathways be contingent on “good behaviour” while on the farm? It’s not too difficult to see how this possible path could become a weapon against organising.
This leaves us with the problem, however, of the effects on the sender country. Many Pacific Island Countries only signed on to the temporary migrant worker schemes because of its temporary nature. The idea of a permanent drain of skilled labour to Australia appeals neither to the local bourgeoisie nor the labour movement. As Dr. Basil Leodoro of the Vanuatu Association of Public Sector Employees reminded me:
“I think if we focused on what Australia is opening up for others outside, we will miss the opportunities for within Vanuatu to create agricultural opportunities, job opportunities for our own farmers”
The reliance on the SWP and PLS has provided very little benefit to pacific economies beyond the sheer ability of the working class to reproduce itself through secure work abroad. It is unclear that an Agricultural Visa will be any different for ASEAN countries.
What is clear is that the Australian labour movement and its allies should seek some stake in the governance of the visa. The government has claimed that the rights of workers under the scheme will be protected by the Fair Work Ombudsman and… Border Force. People on the left should agitate for the inclusion of unions in the onboarding process for new migrants and the design of the visa.
On the home front, support should be given to campaigns for securing workplace rights and representation among the 60 000 undocumented workers currently working in Australian agriculture. Calls for visa amnesty have come from unlikely places [5]. We can be fairly certain, however, that the Nationals will drop such calls now they are getting access to cheap labour from the ASEAN countries. The campaign for visa amnesty must be taken up by the left for the sake of the whole working class.
Only as we come to know the details of the agriculture visa will we be able to work out its real weaknesses. Like any reform, however, it cannot be seen as a panacea or silver bullet. Instead, we should see any extension of civil rights as an opportunity to expand and deepen our organising. Without a strong labour movement, we can be certain that such legislation will be nothing more than a weapon in the hand of the employer. The state of the agricultural struggle, and the major victories of the last few years, will be the subject of our final article.
References:
[1] https://www.theadvocate.com.au/story/7449906/ag-visas-will-throw-locals-out-of-work-unions-claim/
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2021-07-01/covid-farm-sector-angry-over-visa-changes-backpacker-ag-labour/100256492
[3] Campbell, I., “Harvest Labour Markets in Australia: Alleged Labour Shortages and Employer Demand for Temporary migrant workers”, pp. 75-76
[4] https://www.dfat.gov.au/sites/default/files/australian-agriculture-visa-fact-sheet.pdf
[5] https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/nationals-mps-endorse-amnesty-for-illegal-migrant-farm-workers-20210225-p575xy.html