Speaker 1: Already and this is this is the Daily off.
Speaker 2: This is the Daily OS. Oh, now it makes sense.
Speaker 2: Good morning, and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Friday,
Speaker 2: the eighteenth of July. I'm Billy fitz.
Speaker 1: Simon's I'm Sam Kazluski.
Speaker 2: If you're a young person who's worked in retail, hospitality
Speaker 2: or other casual jobs, you're probably wondered at some point
Speaker 2: whether you are not being paid fairly. Now, new research
Speaker 2: from the University of Melbourne suggests your suspicions are correct.
Speaker 2: A major study surveying nearly three thousand young workers has
Speaker 2: found that one in three have likely been underpaid. Even
Speaker 2: when you account for junior rates, the findings are stuck.
Speaker 2: Around ten percent of workers were paid just ten dollars
Speaker 2: an hour or less, more than half weren't paid over
Speaker 2: time they were entitled to, and one in five weren't
Speaker 2: paid for work they're done. It doesn't stop there. Young
Speaker 2: workers told researchers they are forbidden from taking breaks, forced
Speaker 2: to complete unpaid trial shifts, and even being paid in
Speaker 2: the form of food instead of money. At the heart
Speaker 2: of it is a lack of education and awareness about
Speaker 2: rights at work, and a lack of leverage to push
Speaker 2: back to help us understand these findings and their implications
Speaker 2: for young workers across Australia. Sam was joined on today's
Speaker 2: podcast by Tom Dillon, research fellow at the Center for
Speaker 2: Employment and Labor Relations Law at the University of Melbourne,
Speaker 2: who co authored this new report. We'll get to that
Speaker 2: chat just after a quick message from our sponsor.
Speaker 3: Tom.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast
Speaker 1: this morning.
Speaker 3: Oh my pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1: The first question I wanted to ask you about this
Speaker 1: work that you've been doing is whether you framed low
Speaker 1: pay to the subjects of your survey as a perception
Speaker 1: and a feeling or as a standard.
Speaker 3: There's a few sort of ways to sort of conceptualize that.
Speaker 3: The survey insisted of a number of questions which sort
Speaker 3: of asked different things and with slightly different criteria. By
Speaker 3: and large, it could be characterized as a feeling or
Speaker 3: an opinion insofar as we didn't require production of evidence
Speaker 3: for the respondent's conclusions. The questions were really just geared
Speaker 3: around asking respondents about their perceptions of exploitation or their
Speaker 3: experiences in the workplace.
Speaker 1: And so what you essentially found was about one in
Speaker 1: three young people are feeling exploited or feeling underpaid. What
Speaker 1: does that look like in practice?
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, unfortunately, in part it speaks for itself. There's
Speaker 3: a number of alarming statistics that do arise from the survey.
Speaker 3: As for what it looks like, I think that really
Speaker 3: requires sort of a bit of a think about the
Speaker 3: broader picture. And to that end, we did find that
Speaker 3: forty three percent had been required to complete work without
Speaker 3: additional pay right or complete additional work without pay. But
Speaker 3: further to that is also a number of other things
Speaker 3: which flow on not just from under payments, but also
Speaker 3: other poor experiences. So for example, thirty six percent being
Speaker 3: forbidden to take breaks they were entitled to, thirty five
Speaker 3: percent having their timeshit hours reduced by their employer, twenty
Speaker 3: four percent not being paid superannuation, and just under ten
Speaker 3: percent receiving food or products in lieu of money.
Speaker 1: And that last stat really alarms me, as to did
Speaker 1: the stat that one in ten workers reported being paid
Speaker 1: ten dollars an hour or less. That's less than half
Speaker 1: the minimum wage. So I guess my question with that
Speaker 1: is how, I mean, let's take that and the food
Speaker 1: in lieu of payment in one how are employers getting
Speaker 1: away with this kind of thing.
Speaker 3: Really, it's sort of the result of it a number
Speaker 3: of things. Young workers in employment relationships, they encounter power
Speaker 3: and balances that are sort of inherent within them. Beyond that,
Speaker 3: we also can that young workers are less likely to
Speaker 3: sort of be informed of their rights.
Speaker 1: Whose job do you think that is? Whose job is
Speaker 1: it to inform them?
Speaker 3: I would consider it to be a matter for regulatory authorities.
Speaker 3: And that follows on to some of the conclusions we
Speaker 3: made in the report where we really implored the regulators
Speaker 3: to promote themselves and educate young workers, while also allowing
Speaker 3: those young workers to see that the regulators can be
Speaker 3: there to help them and that they do have those
Speaker 3: statutory functions.
Speaker 1: Because it's an interesting point you raise, right in terms
Speaker 1: of the statutory functions, the way that the law is
Speaker 1: set out, the structures in place, particularly for casual employment,
Speaker 1: might have something to answer for here as well. Is
Speaker 1: the actual environment and rules that everyone's playing by aren't
Speaker 1: actually fair? Do you think that that's a fair characterization.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, a real difficulty with part of the legal
Speaker 3: framework as I see it, is sort of a lack
Speaker 3: of concrete sort of easily referable standards and limitations. What
Speaker 3: it states is that an employer can't ask an employee
Speaker 3: to work additional hours that are unreasonable. But in reality,
Speaker 3: a seventeen year old at a fast food chain will
Speaker 3: have real difficulty enforcing something like that, because it's already
Speaker 3: hard enough to come to a supervisor airing a grievance,
Speaker 3: let alone, when all you have behind you is a
Speaker 3: indefinite legal right that might on might not protect you,
Speaker 3: and that might be a matter for a court to decide,
Speaker 3: and it makes it really difficult and contributes to the
Speaker 3: problem in my view.
Speaker 1: And a discussion with your employer about what the word
Speaker 1: reasonable means and doesn't mean with power imbalance out there
Speaker 1: in the open playing out, and another area I found
Speaker 1: myself thinking of that particular dynamic in your research was
Speaker 1: around this idea of you mentioned workers said that they
Speaker 1: lacked leverage to negotiate, and I think that that's another
Speaker 1: you know, what does leverage actually mean to a young
Speaker 1: employee is very different?
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, you know, And you think there's definitely circumstances
Speaker 3: where employees in the workforce can have leverage over employers,
Speaker 3: but a lot of the time that will only occur
Speaker 3: when it's a very high skilled senior employee with a
Speaker 3: lot of desirable and rare skills.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: An issue that confronts a lot of the young workers
Speaker 3: is that, you know, just by nature of being so young,
Speaker 3: a lot of the jobs they can pick up are
Speaker 3: in retail or in fast food things like that, and
Speaker 3: in some respects the skills are replaceable in that the
Speaker 3: employers at least consider that a lot of other people
Speaker 3: can do them, and that really undermines any leverage that
Speaker 3: or the minimal leverage that a teenager might have in
Speaker 3: the workplace.
Speaker 1: Anyway, can you give me a sense of one level
Speaker 1: of detail beneath this idea of young people, and if
Speaker 1: there's any particular differences in gender, in cultural and linguistic diversity,
Speaker 1: any socioeconomic drivers. Perhaps of the people who responded by
Speaker 1: saying that they felt underpaid.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, And part of the survey results that we
Speaker 3: were concerned with was identifying factors like that, and we
Speaker 3: arrived at the conclusion that there are a number of
Speaker 3: characteristics that do affect and that did bear out in
Speaker 3: the survey. Some of those being non males, were more
Speaker 3: likely to report exploitation, as were people with a disability.
Speaker 3: The same was true of non permanent residents, so say
Speaker 3: temporary visa holders, and also having a preferred language other
Speaker 3: than English, and those in addition to the precarious working
Speaker 3: arrangements as well. So there are all things which we
Speaker 3: found to be consistent or indicative of greater likelihoods of
Speaker 3: exploitation or mistreatment.
Speaker 1: I've got two more questions for you, Tom, and I
Speaker 1: kind of want to bring this into kind of right
Speaker 1: here today on Friday. If you could give one recommendation
Speaker 1: to a policy maker, what would that be? But also
Speaker 1: I'm keen to hear your thoughts on if you could
Speaker 1: give one recommendation to a young person listening who might
Speaker 1: feel as though they are in the kind of situation
Speaker 1: that you're describing, what's one piece of advice for them
Speaker 1: as well.
Speaker 3: So as for policymakers, we did provide six recommendations at
Speaker 3: the conclusion of the report. I think one that I'm
Speaker 3: particularly interested in, and that might sort of be more
Speaker 3: of a legislative thing than an in practice thing, would
Speaker 3: be consideration of the inclusion of something called a loaded rate. So,
Speaker 3: in short, a loaded rate is pretty much an hourly
Speaker 3: rate which tries to anticipate and encapsulate penalty rates. So
Speaker 3: say if someone was paid one hundred dollars an hour
Speaker 3: at a at nighttime and fifty during the day, the
Speaker 3: loaded rate would be seventy five.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: So I am partial to that recommendation because I think,
Speaker 3: as the survey showed, there's so many young people that
Speaker 3: aren't paid these penalty rates and that aren't paid the
Speaker 3: appropriate amounts, and I think one potentially quite clean way
Speaker 3: to do that would be to introduce a loaded rate
Speaker 3: which accounts for them, such that employers in some respects
Speaker 3: wouldn't have a choice about whether to pay or not
Speaker 3: to pay the appropriate rate. As for the young workers themselves,
Speaker 3: I would really recommend them to familiarize themselves to the
Speaker 3: best extent they can with their workplace rights. I think
Speaker 3: it's so easy to sort of just go to work
Speaker 3: and not think too much about them and assume that,
Speaker 3: especially a large employer, is going to do the right thing,
Speaker 3: but unfortunately we found that's not the case. The Fair
Speaker 3: Work Umbertsmen publishes a lot of resources online which are
Speaker 3: meant for audiences of all ages and competencies, and I
Speaker 3: think even getting across some basic ones like entitlements to
Speaker 3: be paid more on public holidays, and when you may
Speaker 3: or may not be entitled to overtime, how often you
Speaker 3: should get breaks at work, even things like that. I
Speaker 3: think the most important thing is these young workers recognizing
Speaker 3: they have these rights and that's the first step to
Speaker 3: enforcing them and making sure that they can be fulfilled
Speaker 3: and they do bear out in practice.
Speaker 1: Tom, thanks for joining us on the Daily os this morning.
Speaker 3: Fain a pleasure.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me such a fascinating chat,
Speaker 2: and thank you so much for listening to today's podcast.
Speaker 2: We'll be back this afternoon with the headlines, but until then,
Speaker 2: have a great day.
Speaker 1: My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda
Speaker 1: Bunjelung Kalkuttin woman from Gadighl Country.
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Speaker 3: past and present.