A Canberra massage parlour that underpaid its seven Filipino employees by nearly a million dollars has been ordered to pay them the money they worked for.
The Federal Court found that Foot and Thai Massage in Belconnen breached the Fair Work Act in the way it treated its masseuses who were in Australia on temporary work visas.
The six women and one man were told that if they complained, their families in the Philippines would be killed.
One of the workers, Delo Be Isugan, said that when she went to the Philippines in 2019, a motorcyclist with a full-face helmet parked in front of her and a friend. "I was scared, I thought they were going to shoot us," she said.
The court found the workers weren't paid the rates they were entitled to, including the minimum hourly rate.
They were locked overnight in a house in the suburb of Higgins, and transported to and from work in a van.
The Fair Work Ombudsman, which brought the case on the workers' behalf, said they had been "underpaid a total of $971,092 and subjected to coercion, discrimination and adverse action" between June 2012 to February, 2016.
In the Federal Court, Justice Anna Katzmann found that the workers, who spoke limited English, had spent three to five years "living in fear".
She imposed a $778,100 penalty against the company and a further $150,140 penalty against its director, Colin Kenneth Elvin of Canberra.
In addition, the workers' supervisor, Jun Millard Puerto, was penalised $38,650 for the way he threatened the staff.
On top of these penalties, the judge ordered that the workers should get their back pay totalling just over a million dollars.
Foot and Thai Massage has gone out of business, so the court ordered that the penalty of around a million dollars should be paid to the workers as their back pay.
It is not clear that they will get their money.
The Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth welcomed what she said was the third-highest total penalties in the regulator's history.
"This matter is one of the most shocking cases of exploitation the Fair Work Ombudsman has ever encountered and deserves the strongest possible condemnation," she said.
"The deliberate and calculated exploitation of vulnerable migrant workers has absolutely no place in Australian society.
"No visa holder worker should ever face employer threats to the safety of their family, or threats to be deported if they use their workplace rights to raise concerns about their employment."
