Solving labour crisis in the bush is not rocket science

Filling the shortages: ADF members from Townsville arrive in Hobart to assist with the arrival of seasonal workers from East Timor in November last year. Picture: Nikki Davis-Jones/News Corp

The agriculture industry is in crisis. The visa program bringing in Pacific workers is facing a class action lawsuit amid allegations of a “slave trade”. A landmark decision by the Fair Work Commission has decreed piece rates must be paid above a minimum wage floor because of widespread exploitation on farms.

Even before it has begun, the new agriculture visa is beset by immigration scams in Southeast Asian nations and there are now more undocumented migrants on farms than ever before.

These are not new problems and they are echoed around the globe in countries where temporary migrants toil to pick fresh fruit and vegetables against a backdrop of wage theft, exploitation and illegal work.

The flip side to this farm labour crisis is an Australian agriculture industry that has faced labour challenges for decades. This has been accelerated by closed borders during the pandemic and will continue in the summer harvest, with consequences ranging from crop losses to unmanageable workloads for both farmers and workers.

There is an urgent need for a bipartisan approach to solving the farm labour crisis, one that goes beyond party politics and that is prepared to canvass politically difficult solutions.

The federal government’s own report on a National Agriculture Workforce Strategy develops a blueprint to address the farm labour crisis. The first reform principle is that visa programs that bring in temporary migrants should be regulated and monitored in a consistent way.

This doesn’t sound like rocket science, yet we have arrived at a system where multiple visa programs operate to supply migrant labour to farmers. Each of these programs is regulated in different ways and by different government departments.

Some visas, particularly the working holiday visa, are not regulated at all. The result: a race to the bottom in labour standards on farms whereby farmers can play off different cohorts of migrant workers against each other in order to maximise profits.

Now the government is proposing the new agriculture visa into the mix. Will this mirror the worker-protective requirements in the Seasonal Worker Program or the more diluted requirements in the Pacific Labour Scheme? Or will the visa be based on a light-touch approach that exists within the working holiday visa?

There is no country around the world with as many visa programs as Australia for meeting farmers’ needs and yet ironically none of these programs, either individually or cumulatively, has been effective in meeting labour needs.

New Zealand provides an example of how this could be done much better. Its approach, built over two decades, is based on tripartite management of a single visa program, which facilitates the entry of Pacific workers onto farms. Employers have to be pre-approved to access overseas workers, they lose their right to do so if they are found exploiting workers; worker-protective conditions are monitored and enforced; and unions and peak farm bodies work together to administer the program. There is no race to the bottom between different cohorts of temporary migrants on different visas and both unions and peak bodies have a critical role in weeding out exploitative contractors and farmers, and managing the caps and other settings in the program.

This points to the second principle that should govern Australia’s response: tripartism is essential if a way forward is to be found. The National Farmers Federation, AusVeg and Australian Fresh Produce Alliance must acknowledge and own the depth and breadth of exploitation in their industry. This is not a case of a few bad apples but of an industry that has an entrenched problem with noncompliance with labour standards.

Similarly, the United Workers Union and the Australian Workers Union must be prepared to come to the negotiating table with farmers and government to design a uniform fit-for-purpose visa program and career pathways for local workers that are economically sustainable for the industry and will meet its needs.

Underpinning these principles is an urgent need to address the role of the supermarkets and, of course, the elephant in the room – the agriculture industry’s dependence on undocumented migrants.

Undocumented migrants on farms, which the government’s own report suggests number between 60,000 and 100,000 workers, is the dark underbelly of an agriculture industry that relies on an unregulated migrant workforce to pick fruit and vegetables. As long as farmers and contractors can undercut legal sources of labour with undocumented migrants, the race to the bottom continues.

Given the paucity of Australia’s enforcement efforts, the geographical dispersion of farms and the substantial numbers of undocumented migrants, there is little merit in the current approach based on detection and deportation. Instead, there needs to be a pathway for this group to regularise their immigration status and move on to the new agriculture visa with a pathway to permanency. Although such a reform is politically inconceivable without bipartisan support, considerable headway was made earlier this year when the National Party came out in favour of status resolution for undocumented migrants.

There is no silver bullet for solving the farm labour crisis. But in the National Agriculture Workforce Strategy there is a template for how it should be done, and the government would do well to heed its own report.

Dr Joanna Howe is an associate professor in law at the University of Adelaide and a member of the Ministerial Advisory Council on Skilled Migration