Page 3978 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 1 December 2021
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Other states have recognised the problem to the extent that they have introduced legislation to address it. In June 2020 the Victorian parliament passed legislation establishing criminal penalties for employers who deliberately underpay or do not pay their workers. The Queensland Criminal Code was amended to enable wage theft to be prosecuted.
I turn now to the ACTU submission to the Senate committee inquiry into unlawful underpayment of employee remuneration on 6 March 2020. This is from the ACTU, Mr Assistant Speaker, and it includes statements that link to the situation here:
Wage theft goes beyond paying under-award wages and also includes the following:
Failing to pay overtime;
Not paying appropriately for higher duties;
Failing to pay for ‘on call’ periods, and:
Annualised wages being set, or falling, below award agreement minima, and/or not taking into account additional hours.
I will say that again for your benefit, Mr Assistant Speaker. Wage theft, according to the ACTU, is setting wages below award agreement minimums, and not taking into account additional hours. These key elements—unpaid overtime, unpaid on-call periods and wages being set without accounting for overtime hours—are what has been identified by the ACTU as wage theft. This is a practice that the ACTU called the “seedy underbelly of exploitation”.
It is a sad day, members, when the employer that we are discussing today is the ACT government, and the victims are our teachers. The question then, when we have a prima facie case on several fronts of what appears to be wage theft, is: what does this Assembly do about it? What do we do? I am not a workplace lawyer, but I know that we cannot have a report as troubling as this that has come before us, and for us to do nothing—and, worse still, for the government to investigate itself again, to send it to an internal review, and come back and say that there is nothing wrong. That is not acceptable.
I simply do not trust this government to review itself. We need, and our teachers deserve, a fair, impartial, expert appraisal of what is going on. Is this exploitation, as the AEU said? Is it wage theft, as is suggested by the ACTU? And what is the appropriate remedy? The motion today seeks to place this matter before the Fair Work Ombudsman, the umpire on these matters. The Fair Work Ombudsman, according to its website, includes the following functions:
provide education, assistance, advice and guidance to employers, employees, outworkers, outworker entities and organisations;
promote and monitor compliance with workplace laws;
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