Indentured Servitude: The Rotten Side Of Australia’s Fruit Picking Industry

 

Amongst the various jobs readily available in Australia, fruit picking is marketed as one of the few industries in the world where you are truly rewarded for your hard work. Fruit pickers aren’t paid by the hour, but rather by the kilogram or the bucketful. It’s a situation where the harder one works, the more money they take home at the end of the week.

Likewise, lazy, freeloading coworkers are paid according to their (limited) contributions. This sounds like sweet, poetic justice to people like myself, who have constantly pulled more than their own in the workplace. Being rewarded for hard work, whilst watching your freeloading coworkers suffer for their laziness, has a sick, Machiavellian appeal to me.

Fruit picking is a nice career option for people who don’t mind hard work or the outdoors, and who would like to be paid according to their efforts. But like most things in life, if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. There is a not so sweet side to the fruit picking industry. A dark side that the world needs to know about.

The industry…

With tens of thousands of farms across Australia, agriculture is an industry that has potential for full time and seasonal workers. Thanks to the delicate nature of fruit harvesting, it’s not possible to have a large tractor come along and harvest a large area of trees, like the way wheat is harvested. Fruits must be handled with care so they are not damaged or bruised. Human labour is required (eat fruit, support humans!). Couple this with the fact that fruit picking is seasonal work, often in very remote locations, and must be harvested in a very short space of time, and there is no shortage of job opportunities available when the fruits need picking.

The domestic labourer…

We’ve all heard this nugget: “Immigrants do all the jobs that Aussies/Americans/British/Canadians etc don’t want to do!” This statement falsely implies that nobody but immigrants are capable of performing certain duties. It also implies that nobody had ever performed these duties before immigrants arrived. It is a silly conclusion to arrive at, and yet it is one that is preached like gospel every day of our lives.

However, we do find ourselves in a situation where we have a severe shortage of fruit pickers in Australia. We have plenty of +$1000 per week fruit picking jobs on offer, however these job vacancies are not being filled. Fruit farmers would love to hire their fellow Aussies, but are in a position where they have no choice but to give the jobs, and the money, to foreign labour.

One might be inclined to call the Australian job seeker lazy or a snob for turning his/her nose up to this kind of work. However, you can sympathize with the Australian for being unwilling to relocate to remote locations for seasonal work. Being closer to home and family, and having stable employment is desired by most.

The foreign labourer…

So the immigrants will come and do all the jobs that the lazy Aussies don’t want to do huh? Not quite… Certain farms and agricultural factories have been caught red handed passing over domestic Australian workers in favour of foreigners who have been granted a “417 visa” (a 417 visa is a 6 month long holiday working visa which allows one to perform low skilled jobs such as fruit picking).

These employers have created a slave-like work environment where foreign employees are forced to work long hours, are severely underpaid (or are instead paid with “food and lodging” in these remote locations) and the women workers are often propositioned for sex in exchange for permanent working visas.

Even worse, Greens Party leader and Senator, Richard Di Natale has been caught paying couples $150 per week (a mere 25% of the national minimum wage) plus board and food to work on his family farm. This exemplifies the worst kind of hypocrisy, considering the Greens and Di Natale himself had made “workers pay and work place conditions” a central feature of their 2016 election campaign.

The bitter fruits of slave labour…

Not all Aussies are snobs who turn their noses up at unskilled labour work. Additionally, not all farm owners run their farms like feudal lords, exploiting their serfs and working them into the ground. There are many people in this country on both sides of the fruit picking equation who act honestly and obey the laws.

However these people are punished for their honesty. When you pay your employees a fair and decent wage, naturally your product will be more expensive than those who do not act with this level of integrity. These honest, more expensive fruit suppliers get passed over and lose contracts to the suppliers who are able to offer a cheaper product. This is due to making large savings through exploiting immigrant labour.

Even some of our largest farmers are losing contracts from major supermarkets to those who exploit cheap, foreign labour. Coles, Woolworths, Aldi, and Costco, the nations largest grocers, have all been complicit in reinforcing the exploitation of foreign workers by passing over the honest farmers, and awarding the contracts to the crooks.

This is the direct result of an Australian policy failure. Multiple government departments such as the fair work ombudsman and the department of immigration have failed to act on this issue, as governments do not wish to regulate the industry. Instead, choosing to keep the market as free and open as possible (free market fails again).

This has been Australia’s shameful story of failed government policy and farmers cruelly exploiting foreign workers. As I understand, this story is not unique to fruit picking, and it is not unique to Australia. Many others outside of this industry and this nation have their own sad stories to tell. If we are to all get an honest and fair go in the job market, we all need to share our stories and our struggles with the world. We need to have our stories heard.

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Harrison Stamoudis is a freelance writer from Melbourne, Australia. After a lifetime of being praised for his intellect and being told “you can do anything you want”, he was doomed to grow up without guidance and direction (it’s difficult to pick a door when they are all open for you). Aimlessly wandered from one job to the next, he struggled to pick a path and stick to it. Harrison often had to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet and the work history list on his resume is a little longer than he cares to mention. Harrison is currently in the process of completing higher education (for a third time) so that he may make his next major career change, this time civil engineering.