migration - Lamp Online

A comprehensive survey of international workers and temporary migrants in Australia has found a third earned $12 an hour or less, or half the legal minimum wage.

The survey, published as a report called Wage Theft in Australia, was conducted by academics from the University of NSW and University of Technology, Sydney.

The online survey covered 4,322 respondents from 107 countries. It was open to anyone who had worked in Australia on a temporary visa and was made available in 13 languages.

The survey found large-scale wage theft was worst in fruit and vegetable-picking and farm work, where 15 per cent of workers earned $5 an hour or less. Almost a third (31 per cent) earned $10 an hour or less.

The study also found that for every 100 underpaid migrant workers, only three went to the fair work ombudsman. Of those, more than half recovered nothing.

There were several barriers to reporting wage theft. Many overseas workers were unsure of the process or believed it would be too difficult to recover the wages, and more than a quarter said they would not speak up because of fears of losing their visa.

One of the researchers, Bassina Farbenblum, a senior law lecturer at University of NSW, said the study confirmed “Australia has a large, silent underclass of underpaid migrant workers”.

“The scale of unclaimed wages is likely well over a billion dollars.”

Unions NSW secretary, Mark Morey, told The Guardian that migrant exploitation was a “national shame that Australia must confront and fix”.

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The worsening impacts of climate change could see over 140 million people move within their countries’ borders by 2050, a new World Bank report has found.

The report, Groundswell – Preparing for Internal Climate Migration, is the first and most comprehensive study of its kind to focus on the nexus between slow-onset climate change impacts, internal migration patterns and development.

The study warns of “a looming human crisis” in three developing regions of the world: Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. It predicts that climate change will create “hotspots” where people will pour into already crowded slums.

It says that unless urgent climate and development action is taken globally and nationally, these three regions together could be dealing with tens of millions of internal climate migrants by 2050.

These internal migrants will be “forced to move from increasingly non-viable areas of their countries due to
growing problems like water scarcity, crop failure, sea-level rise and storm surges”.

World Bank CEO Kristalina Georgieva says there is a “small window now before the effects of climate change deepen, to prepare the ground for this new reality”.

She says with concerted action – including global efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions and robust development planning at the country level – the worst-case scenario of over 140 million could be dramatically reduced by as much as 80 per cent, or more than 100 million people.

Wage theft rampant among overseas workers

Climate change will cause mass internal migration