Joint Letter to Ministers RE Jobs and Skills Summit

Along with our partners in the community legal sector, JobWatch has sent a letter to the Prime Minister, Treasurer and Ministers Gallagher, Burke, Rishworth, O’Connor, O’Neil and Husic before the Jobs and Skills Summit this week with a list of five key reforms to reduce the exploitation of vulnerable workers.

August 31, 2022

Along with our partners in the community legal sector, JobWatch has sent a letter to the Prime Minister, Treasurer and Ministers Gallagher, Burke, Rishworth, O’Connor, O’Neil and Husic before the Jobs and Skills Summit this week with a list of five key reforms to reduce the exploitation of vulnerable workers.

These reforms include:

1. Criminalise wage theft and ensure that the legal dispute resolution mechanism for workers to recover all unpaid entitlements and superannuation is efficient, accessible, and inexpensive.
2. Eliminate sham contracting arrangements: amend the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) (“Fair Work Act”) to create a presumption of employment relationship instead of a contracting relationship
3. Decrease over-casualisation: improve the definition of ‘casual employee’ in the Fair Work Act to ensure that it can only be used to describe employees whose work is truly casual.
4. Allow migrant workers to act against exploitative employers: provide effective visa protections to whistle-blowers that report exploitation or wage theft to the Fair Work Ombudsman, and extend these protections to exploitation and wage theft claims progressed through the courts.
5. Extend the Fair Entitlements Guarantee to all employees, including those on temporary visas. Applicants can currently claim a certain level of unpaid wages, notice, annual leave and redundancy pay and the scheme should be extended to include claims on super.

Read the full letter.