Refugees and asylum seekers employed to sort rubbish were systematically exploited and underpaid by one of the biggest recycling organisations in Victoria.
A recycling company formerly known as Polytrade, a linked subsidiary, and its owners, were fined more than $375,000 in the federal court this month, over what a judge described as “obnoxious conduct” and a “cavalier disregard” for the law, grossly underpaying migrant workers who spoke little English and were vulnerable to exploitation.
The five workers were in Australia on protection visas and bridging visas, pending the approval of protection visa applications. They had arrived in Australia as asylum seekers from south Asia.
The workers were paid a flat rate of $22 an hour, regardless of whether they worked at night, on weekends or public holidays. Some of the workers told the court they worked 12-hour days, six and seven days a week.
The workers have since been backpaid in full.
But the company was also found liable for far wider underpayment, of workers who were not part of the court action. In total, Polytrade was found to have underpaid workers $2.2m since 2012.
Justice John Snaden, in the federal court in Victoria, said Polytrade’s systemic underpayment was “wantonly naive, at best. At worst, it involved a deliberate and cavalier disregard of important award safety net obligations.”
The five workers “were paid between 53% and 58% only of what the award required that they be paid: on any view, those are damning figures”, Snaden said.
At the time of the offending, across 2018 and 2019, Polytrade was one of the biggest recycling companies in Victoria, running facilities in Dandenong and Hallam, and holding waste management contracts with several local governments.
Snaden said the total fines imposed, while significant, were warranted against Polytrade, given the “scale and audacity of its transgressions”.
“The court must exact a heavy toll: not merely to ensure that PES is brought to account for its obnoxious conduct; but also to serve as a warning to other employers.”
The federal court imposed fines against Polytrade (now known as PT349 Pty Ltd), PTES 928 Pty Ltd (formerly Polytrade Employment Services Pty Ltd), and Polytrade’s owners, husband and wife Man Sang Chen and Pui Shan Ho.
The acting Fair Work ombudsman, Kristen Hannah, said her office took the underpayment of migrant workers “particularly seriously”.
“These workers can be vulnerable if they are unaware of their entitlements or reluctant to complain,” Hannah said. “But visa holders have the same workplace rights as all other workers.
“Any employer that blatantly underpays migrant workers’ basic entitlements risks facing significant penalties.”
The Polytrade judgment follows another decision in the federal circuit and family court, fining Quayclean, a national company with contracts to clean some of Australia’s largest sporting stadiums, for systemically underpaying cleaners, paying some as little as $7 an hour.
The Fair Work ombudsman secured $332,964 in penalties in court, including $174,420 against Quayclean, in response to the underpayment of cleaners at the Docklands stadium in Melbourne. Twenty-five cleaners were underpaid nearly $100,000.
Judge Caroline Kirton said Quayclean admitted knowing the funds it paid to its subcontracting companies – Lionheart and Ranvel – were insufficient for those companies to pay cleaners a legal wage.
Hannah described supply chains in the cleaning industry as “high-risk”.
“Workers employed in the cleaning sector are low-paid, often vulnerable migrant workers with limited awareness of their workplace rights.”
The Fair Work ombudsman recovered $509m in unpaid wages and entitlements for more than 250,000 workers in the 2022-23 financial year.
Over the past five financial years, the ombudsman has filed 126 litigations involving visa holder workers in court, securing more than $13.4m in penalties.
In June this year, the Albanese government introduced tougher penalties on employers who exploit migrant workers, citing “a crisis of exploitation” and Grattan Institute figures that show up to one in six new migrants are paid less than the minimum wage.
The changes include a tripling of financial penalties for employers who break the law; potential prison terms for employers who coerce migrant employees to breach their visa conditions; and the introduction of prohibition notices to “stop employers from further hiring people on temporary visas where they have exploited migrants”.
The home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, said Australia’s migration system had, over a decade, “drifted deeper and deeper into reliance on low-paid temporary migrant workers who we know are routinely exploited”.
