Supermarket giant acts on 'appalling' worker conditions
Workers under the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme were particularly vulnerable due to their strict visa conditions, which stop them from changing employers, lawyer Joshua Strutt said.
"PALM visa holders are one of the most exploited temporary visa holders in Australia," said Mr Strutt, the chief executive of the Immigration Advice and Rights Centre.
The PALM scheme allows eligible Australian businesses to hire people from Pacific Island countries and Timor-Leste, usually to work in agriculture and meat processing.
The legal service has heard from PALM workers who have been severely injured in workplace accidents, but are too scared to seek medical care.
"There's this really huge power imbalance that exists through this system that needs to be fixed," Mr Strutt told the inquiry in Sydney on Monday.
The NSW parliamentary inquiry is examining the risks of modern slavery in rural areas, investigating the extent of forced labour, violence, sexual servitude, labour trafficking and wage violations.
Supermarket giant Woolworths took on a labour hire company after being told migrant workers in its Queensland supply chain were living in poor conditions.
"We did a site inspection and the housing conditions were indeed appalling and unliveable," Woolworths group's human rights general manager Rachel Elliott said.
"The workers had raised this with the labour hire provider to no avail."
The unnamed labour hire organisation was booted from migrant worker schemes, but there have since been reports of the company attempting to operate in other states, she said.
Woolworths conducts 1000 workplace audits in its supply chain each year, revealing about 5000 incidents of non-compliance that range from fire safety issues to underpayment.
The underpayments were often the result of labour hire companies failing to pass on entitlements to workers, Ms Elliott said.
After audits in NSW over the last two years, Woolworths has worked with suppliers to repay $50,000 in the meat industry and $48,000 in horticulture.
Overcrowded accommodation was another pressing issue, with regular reports of 10 people living in one house and paying $170 per bed, Australian Workers' Union organiser Jonathan Cook told the inquiry.
"It is a clear and obvious exploitation of farm workers," Mr Cook said.
Several agricultural industry bodies cited an independent survey conducted by the Australian National University and the World Bank that found 98 per cent of PALM workers would recommend the scheme to others.
But workers were not in a position of power to be open about their conditions, Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees' Association industrial officer Bernard Govind said.
"We know migrant workers ... have a visceral fear of speaking up against workplace exploitation for fear of visa cancellation and deportation."
The inquiry is due to hold a hearing in Griffith on June 19.
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Retirees Jan and Jim Edwards almost lost the deposit on a new apartment this year after relying on their agent's advice that their four-bedroom Newcastle home was worth between $1 million and $1.1 million. The Edwardses said that after listing the property, the agent pressured them to drop the price guide. By the time of the auction, the guide was reduced to $850,000, and the home passed in at $948,000. 'But we needed more than $1 million because we had already paid the deposit on a two-bedroom unit, and because we are retired, we don't work and we can't get a bank loan,' Jan Edwards said. The couple read about the auction of their Newcastle home in last weekend's launch of the Bidding Blind investigation when would-be buyer David Witherdin spoke of his attempts to buy their house on behalf of his parents. 'I was sorry for the gentleman who missed out on buying our home,' Jan said. 'He was so misled by the agent who thought she would pressure us into accepting $160,000 less than we were asking.' While Witherdin lost hundreds of dollars in wasted due diligence costs through his failed attempt to buy the property, Jan said she and Jim would have lost about $10,500 on their failure to sell given storage, marketing and other costs. The couple terminated their agency agreement, relisted the home with a new agent and sold it two weeks later for $1.07 million. Veteran Sydney agent Bill Malouf, who heads eastern suburbs agency Highland Property, said agents were increasingly buying listings. As stock has dwindled, the number of agents has increased, which has meant greater competition, Malouf said. 'So many agents are desperate to get the business and will say anything to secure it, even though they're meant to be protecting their clients' best interests,' he said. Louis Christopher credits the disconnect between what agents have promised and what vendors will accept as the predominant cause of stale listings on the market for months longer than expected. SQM Research found that in the year to May there were 7019 properties on the market for more than 180 days in Sydney, an increase of 29.5 per cent on the previous year. Likewise, in Melbourne there were 9614 properties still for sale in Melbourne after 180 days, a 15.8 per cent increase in stale listings. A slow sales campaign is not something agents want either. Seller advocate Bernadette Hayes said agents would rather sacrifice a higher result, and therefore commission, for a faster sale. The revenue stream for many agents is not about maximising their commission but maximising sales volume, especially for those who have to split their commission with the franchise head office, Hayes said. 'The more properties they list and sell, the more they make.' A Victorian government report on the state's property market, commissioned in 2022 but never released, contains recommendations to discourage agents lying to vendors to win listings, according to co-author Enzo Raimondo. Loading Raimondo, a former long-term head of the Real Estate Institute of Victoria, calls the practice ' overquoting '. 'It does occur, and it's time for it to be eradicated as much as possible … I think the first step is to release the report,' he said. NSW Fair Trading, meanwhile, is consulting on potential changes to rules governing price guides. Under pressure An agent's first lie is telling owners they can sell for more than their property is worth, said Chris De Celis, a long-time agent in Sydney's western suburbs. The lies that follow are the agent's attempts to crunch the seller on price and manufacture interest from buyers. Merryn Calear knows too well what can go wrong between the hope-filled start of a sale campaign and the reality a few months later. When she listed her Coogee home last year, she was told by Roger Wardy and his team at Ray White Touma Taylor that they would push for $4.2 million. Calear said to sweeten the deal, she was also told the agents would only charge her half price for the advertisements, on a short-term contract and all while they already had a buyer who wanted to buy on her street. A doctor, no less. 'It just all looked golden,' Calear said. She signed an agency agreement that stipulated a guide of $3.7 million to $4.07 million. 'Keep in mind this in (sic) an agreement [that] allows us to guide a price we feel is relevant to get to our goal price,' Wardy texted. It was a scenario he texted Calear that played out on another of his recent sales, a four-bedroom house on Wentworth Street Randwick: 'We started at $3.8m, reserve $4.5m and sold $5.3m.' According to Calear, Wardy said he could definitely achieve a sale price of at least $4 million. Wardy denies that, and said he advised a likely selling range of between $3.4 million and $3.64 million. And while Calear maintained she wouldn't sell for less than $4 million, buyers were given a guide of $3.7 million. Worse, she said: 'The only offers that came in were all around $3 million. The only offer in writing was for $2.98 million. 'That's a $1 million difference. And meanwhile we are still living there, so we had to stage it twice a week to look like it was a home without two kids and a dog living in it. It was such a palaver.' Calear said that as the campaign rolled on, she was advised to cancel the auction because there were only two parties. She said that a few weeks later, Wardy asked her to sign a new agreement with a guide of $3.2 million to $3.52 million given the broader market had started floundering. Throughout she maintained she would only sell for $4 million. A week before Wardy's agency agreement was due to expire, buyer's agent Matt Spooner found a Bronte couple willing to pay $3.5 million. Calear said she wanted to think about the offer over a weekend, but Wardy wasn't waiting. According to Calear, and Wardy's own texts, he told buyers the only reason she hadn't signed was because she was attending to her sick child in hospital. None of Calear's children were sick, nor in hospital. When Calear still hadn't signed the next day, he asked her not to stand outside the house in case the buyers saw her again because 'I told them you were in hospital with your kid'. Wardy's take on the incident differs to his texts. 'When I relayed this to the buyer, I said that given she wasn't responding to calls or messages, she may be attending to a serious issue, potentially even at the hospital. The intention was not to mislead but to retain the buyer's interest during a period of silence from the vendor.' Calear cancelled the agency agreement. 'I felt he was dragging me into something really dirty,' she said. A week later, Calear signed with a new agent, who sold the house a few weeks later for $3.5 million to a different buyer. The last Calear heard from Wardy was in an email in which he demanded a 2.2 per cent commission on the sale. He has not been paid.
