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Whatsapp Roberto and Nelson are welders from the Philippines working in Australia on 457 visas

The Australian migration landscape is changing. We used to be a settler society; people came to Australia to live permanently and become Australian citizens, but over the past 20 years we’ve joined the increasingly global trend of using temporary migrant labour. With this change has come some big questions about the kind of society we are becoming, as Claudia Taranto investigates.

In a suburban house in the NSW South Coast town of Bomaderry, 16 Filipino men lie around on the carpet watching a movie on a laptop. They’re welders who have been brought to Australia on 457 visas to work for Manildra, a large wheat processing company.

Today, however, they’ve been sent home because they’re involved in a dispute over their pay rate. They were promised $27 an hour, but after having thousands of dollars in ‘fees’ unlawfully deducted from their wages, they’re only receiving a little over $9 an hour. They’ve been working 11-hour days, with only one day off a month. Until recently, 25 of them were living in a three bedroom house; the queue for the shower started each morning at 4am.

Are these temporary skill visas encouraging employers to downgrade their own training activities in favour of bringing in skilled workers from overseas?

Like 70 per cent of temporary workers in Australia, they have hopes of one day settling here permanently. In the meantime, they’re here to work, pay taxes and send money home to their families. ‘My son cried a lot when I came here in Australia but I told him, don’t worry son, I will bring home the bacon,’ says one of their number, Jeszar Banajera.

Australia is a highly sought after destination in the global temporary labour market because of our reputation for protecting worker’s rights. Nelson Villarama is wearing an Australian flag baseball cap that he was given by his Australian co-workers. He tells me he was applying for jobs in Australia for two years: ‘I almost every day go to the agency in Manila just to find a job going to Australia.’

The men are bewildered and angry that they’ve been misled and underpaid.

The introduction of 457 visas was a bipartisan policy conceived by the Keating government and implemented under John Howard to plug skills gaps in the labour market. The visas are used in many sectors, including the mining industry, state governments and increasingly the hospitality sector. Today, 7 per cent of Australia’s workforce are on temporary visas, and that figure is 20 per cent among 20 to 24-year-olds.

‘There are definitely benefits to this in a globalised economy and society, we need some of these visas to keep Australia competitive,’ says Henry Sherrell from the Migration Council of Australia.

Not everyone has welcomed the change, however. Dave Noonan, national secretary of the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union, the CFMEU, has concerns.

‘It places workers in inherently vulnerable circumstances and means that often their tenure in the country is tied to their continued employment,’ he says. ‘This gives employers enormous power and sadly we often see that power being exploited.’

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Whatsapp Ramil, a Filipino seafarer who spends 9 months a year at sea, away from his family.

One such worker is a 26-year-old Indian student who had a cleaning job. The student, who preferred to remain anonymous, was working 35 hours a week, though his student visa restricts him to only 20 hours a week. His employer took advantage of the fact that the student didn’t understand Australian law and underpaid him by $3,000. He had no grounds for appeal because he was operating outside the law.

‘You’re not the first guy who’s suffering like this, you’d better forget the money, they’re not going to pay you,’ said his accountant. He knows three other students who were also cheated by the same employer. He now has no money to fund his education and has breached his visa conditions. His case is on appeal with the Department of Immigration. If he is unsuccessful he will have to return to India. ‘I can’t imagine... that’s a big disaster for me,’ he says.

Australia has always called itself a settler society, and for most of the post-WWII era, migrants were on a path to citizenship from the moment they set foot on Australian soil. But that process has now changed to what many call a ‘suck it and see’ system. Workers and students come here temporarily, and if they like Australia and they fit our strict migration criteria they become permanent residents.

There are more temporary migrants applying for residency than there are places for them, however. ‘The downside of this system is for people whose attempts at staying in Australia become complicated,’ says Peter Mares, adjunct fellow at The Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University. ‘People can spend up to eight years here, in the formative years of their lives, they end up feeling they belong here and they no longer feel they fit in back in China or South Korea. They’re in a difficult situation.’

Mares points out that Australia’s vaunted multicultural success story has been based on a high rate of citizenship take up.

‘But if you’re here on a temporary visa and you’re only half embraced by Australia, you can pay taxes but you can’t receive government services and you can’t become permanent,’ he says. ‘Does that change the game in terms of the multicultural bargain?’

There are various conditions to temporary visa, including no access to Medicare, no welfare payments and paying high fees to send your children to government schools in NSW and WA.

Back in Bomaderry, the CFMEU was alerted to the fate of the Filipino welders when the union conducted a routine safety inspection of their worksite, and soon took up the men’s cause. It emerged that they were actually contracted to a Taiwanese labour hire company called Chia Tung. Sin Giragai, the head of YHA, the recruitment agency which recruited the men, told me that Chai Tung failed to understand how payrolls in Australia work. She also admitted that if it hadn’t been for the Australian union none of this would have come to the attention of authorities.

When the Fair Work Ombudsman investigated the case of the Filipino welders, they uncovered a much broader problem that extended well beyond the Bomaderry site. Chia Tung had brought dozens of Filipino and Chinese workers onto various sites in regional NSW and underpaid them by more than $873,000 while housing them in overcrowded accommodation. The Chinese employees were paid nothing for three months of work.

‘One in 10 of our requests for assistance are now coming from visa holders,’ says acting Fair Work Ombudsman Michael Campbell. ‘That’s significant and that is a trend that is concerning us greatly.’

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Whatsapp Mayor Ben Keneally and a family of new Australian citizens at the Botany Council citizenship ceremony

As a result of the investigation, the Filipino welders were paid their unpaid wages and continue to work in Bomaderry.

It’s somewhat ironic that the Filipino men in Bomaderry were helped by the CFMEU, a union that is uncomfortable about temporary workers taking jobs away from Australians.

‘We’ve got hundreds of welders, metal fabricators, electricians, we’ve got plenty of them in this country,’ says the CFMEU’s Dave Curtain.

According to Peter Mares, the real question is about training: ‘Are these temporary skill visas encouraging employers to downgrade their own training activities in favour of bringing in skilled workers from overseas?’

It’s likely that the welders will return to the Philippines at the end of their contracts, but there are some temporary migrants who manage to stay.

On a warm Tuesday night there’s an air of anticipation at the Eastlakes Community Centre as 60 people from 23 countries, dressed in their best saris and suits, get ready to become Australian citizens.

A brass band plays Born Free as the Mayor of Botany Council Ben Keneally arrives, resplendent in his chain of office. He tells the migrants they’ve now become ‘fair dinkum’. One new citizen, originally of Bangladesh, says it was all worth it: ‘Every road has its ups and downs but ultimately you know there is a standard you have to meet because they are seeking good people with good backgrounds that can contribute to this country.’

Australia: Beyond the 'settler society' Listen to part one of Workers Without Borders to hear more one million workers in Australia with temporary work visas.

Workers Without Borders In this major co-production between RN and the BBC World Service you’ll hear powerful stories from people across Asia who travel overseas to find work, exploring the dramatic impact of temporary migrant labour on individuals, families and countries.

Earshot is about people, places, stories and ideas, in all their diversity.