Workers unite for poor students
Bruce Lindsay, convenor of the Geelong Greens, had this opinion piece published in the Geelong Advertiser on February 19.
Geelong Trades Hall and the retail and fast food workers union, Unite, organised a protest at a 7-Eleven store in Geelong last week.
The union action was caused by allegations of exploitative work practices at 7-Eleven franchises.
At the heart of this issue has been the treatment of international students, notably allegations that they are routinely under-paid and threatened with reporting to the Immigration Department for breaching visa conditions.
Courageously, a number of students have kicked up a fuss, sought their union’s backing, and gone public with their treatment. The Workplace Ombudsman’s investigation is ongoing, but as trades hall secretary Tim Gooden said on the day, Geelong is a union town and Geelong workers will not let this kind of situation fester.
As Unite organiser Anthony Main pointed out, it is international students who comprise the largest single group of migrant workers in Australia today. There are more than 250,000 international students in Australia.
In many cases, these students are not well off and their families have invested heavily in sending their son or daughter to Australian universities. In many instances, they are expected to find a job to support themselves once they get here.
Visa conditions require they cannot work more than 20 hours a week. Many find themselves in low-wage sectors, often struggling mightily to balance study and work.
Australian universities and government commonly boast that educational services (read student fees) are the third-biggest export market in Australia. At the same time, it has helped feed demand for low-paid and exploitable workers.
Scepticism in the capacity of the bureaucratic process of an ombudsman’s investigation to sort out these issues was noted on the day. That scepticism may be warranted but it also points to a basic continuity between Howard industrial relations and Rudd industrial relations: there is no legal capacity for workers themselves, organised in their unions, to directly intervene to support these, or any other, exploited and low-paid workers.
In direct contravention of Australia’s obligations under international law, both Howard’s and Rudd’s workplace laws ban one group of workers from taking industrial action in support of another group of workers. This is variously termed ’sympathy strikes’ or ’secondary boycotts’.
If Geelong workers were, on an organised basis, allowed to say to 7-Eleven, ‘Until you bring the treatment of your workers within acceptable and legal standards, we will, for instance, refuse to deliver supplies’, you can bet the drama would be sorted out in a matter of minutes, rather than months.
Allowing this type of direct action would be recognising the right of workers to organise collectively in defence of their interests. These interests include support for weak or vulnerable workers as well as the strong and highly organised.