Ann Arnold: It's late on a Saturday, and the first division men's rugby union game is underway at Mosman Rugby Club, on Sydney's affluent north shore.

Kelly: I think it's a very rough game, in my opinion! [Laughs] Trying to understand how it works.

Ann Arnold: Kelly and her friend Arturo, both graduate students from Colombia, used to come here often, as cleaners.

Ann Arnold: And you never saw any rugby when you were here cleaning.

Arturo: Ah no, not here. When we were cleaning we used to go up there and we just did the cleaning up there.

Ann Arnold: Inside the building.

Arturo: Yeah. We never came around here, no.

Ann Arnold: Arturo and Kelly liked the idyllic setting of the rugby club, a tree-ringed field with a picket fence, on a headland that juts into the harbour. There was one problem; they weren't paid for three of the seven months they cleaned here.

Kelly: Yeah we put in our best and we didn't get anything in return, so that's very sad.

Ann Arnold: It's very sad.

Kelly: And frustrating, especially. Because cleaning is not the job that everybody wants to do, but you've got to do it right.

Ann Arnold: That was almost two years ago. They still haven't been paid by the cleaning contractor who employed them.

Exploitation of international students in the workplace reaches far beyond the scandal of the 7-Eleven convenience stores. Sean Stimson is a lawyer acting for international students at Sydney's Redfern Legal Centre.

Sean Stimson: I mean, 7-Eleven is the tip of the iceberg. What we deal with with our international students at Redfern Legal Centre is that we'll have a client that comes in who says this is what's happening to me. We then will ask the client are there any other people that are working within the company that are experiencing the same. It's generally a yes. And because there are so many companies that are doing this, we know that we are going to soon exceed the figure that 7-Eleven actually has. And that's just within New South Wales. If we look at what's happening nationally, then the numbers are absolutely huge.

Ann Arnold: The cleaning industry is one of the hot spots.

Pedro: I think that there's a lot of companies taking advantage of international students at the moment and paying them very, very little and having them work a lot of hours.

Ann Arnold: How do you know that?

Pedro: Because I work in the industry.

Ann Arnold: In cleaning?

Pedro: Not just in cleaning, in building management, you get to see a lot. There are other companies that will happily pay students cash in hand, and not give them any benefits and have them work six days a week, seven days a week. I've seen it. I don't agree with it and I told the managers of those companies that I didn't want those cleaners working like that in my building when I was doing building management.

Ann Arnold: That's a man who we'll call Pedro, who's been both a cleaning supervisor and a building manager.

More than 60% of the respondents in a recent survey of international students were being paid less than the minimum wage. And that is breaking our employment laws.

Stephen Clibborn from Sydney University's Business School did the survey.

Stephen Clibborn: Well, it suggests to me that employers, at least a large number of them, are seeking out vulnerable workers who are prepared to accept or feel that they can't do anything about the wage theft that they're suffering.

Ann Arnold: Especially when there's been no wage paid at all. Which is what happened to a group of students from Mongolia, late last year. They were hired to do the first clean of a newly built apartment building in Bondi. They were never paid.

Sara: We went to the police. Because we are new in Sydney, and we don't know where to go. Because I think it might be our fault, because we don't know like a lot of law or regulation in that case. So we went like everywhere. We wrote some letters to our embassy, and to the company. And then we called many times to them.

Ann Arnold: Students are attracted to Australia by our highly regarded education system, and the part-time work option that the student visa allows. The higher education industry is a lucrative one. Worth $19 billion, it's our second biggest export industry, after natural resources. And it could be under threat from reputational damage from the treatment of student workers here.

This is Arturo from Colombia:

Arturo: Thinking about the good reputation that Australia has as a country. So, many people really don't expect a country with such a good reputation as one of the best places to live in the world, they really don't expect to come here and then work and be underpaid or just not paid at all.

Ann Arnold: Hello, I'm Ann Arnold and this is Background Briefing.

The exploitation of international students is largely hidden. Students may have limited English, little understanding of our systems, and, especially if they're being underpaid and struggling to get by, might be working more hours than they're permitted on a student visa, which is 40 hours a fortnight. For all those reasons, they are vulnerable to exploitation, and many students are reluctant to challenge employers, and are reluctant to seek help.

Sean Stimson: Okay, I've got some documents in front of me. This is the notice of motion so that we can issue an arrest warrant. It's in regard…

Ann Arnold: An exception is Arturo. He's been on a 20-month quest for payment of $9,000 he's owed, for three months of cleaning, plus court costs. His colleague Kelly is owed the same amount. They always worked within the visa rules and were able to extend their student visas, so, unusually, they can stick around and chase their money.

They've been getting help from Redfern Legal Centre, which has a dedicated service offering advice to international students, the only one in NSW.

Sean Stimson: So the first document is, as I say, the arrest warrant for examination, and it's pretty straightforward. It just outlines…

Ann Arnold: The lawyer is Sean Stimson. He's getting Arturo to sign documents to send to Andrew Nickolls, his former boss.

Arturo: So it's: Dear Mr Nickolls, We confirm that you failed to attend the court on 10 March 2016. Please note that our client is now filing with the court…

Ann Arnold: Arturo worked with Kleen Group in 2014. He and his Colombian friend Kelly worked part-time, five days a week, for seven months altogether.

Arturo: And we had to work in the morning and then we studied in the afternoon.

Ann Arnold: The job involved cleaning apartment buildings and other places. Arturo and Kelly were given a Kleen Group van to cover the set routes each day.

Arturo has a psychology degree and worked in human resources in Colombia. Kelly trained as a telecommunications engineer. Joining Kleen Group in Sydney pitted them against Andrew Nickolls, aka The Intimidator.

Andrew Nickolls, the owner of Kleen Group, also raced Holden utes. His was emblazoned with 'Andrew The Intimidator Nickolls'.

Pedro, not his real name, used to work for him as a supervisor.

Pedro: He had the company ute that we used to go around checking work jobs and carrying equipment to the cleaners.

Ann Arnold: Which said 'Kleen Group' on the outside.

Pedro: It said 'Kleen Group'. He had it wrapped in plastic to copy the racing car, it said 'Andrew Nickolls The Intimidator' to mimic the racing ute.

Ann Arnold: The students' job with Kleen Group started to unravel when, Arturo says, they were being pressured to fit in more work than they could manage. They were arriving late to classes and being marked absent. One of the requirements of a student visa is attending at least 80% of your classes.

Then, for three months, Arturo and Kelly were not paid at all.

Two years later, Andrew Nickolls still hasn't paid them, and he's failed to show up in court to explain why. There's been a court order for money to be withdrawn from Kleen Group's bank account for Arturo and Kelly, but there was only $160 in the account. Now an arrest warrant is underway.

Arturo and I set off to revisit his Kleen Group working route on Sydney's north shore. We'd requested an interview with his old boss Andrew Nickolls, who rang back just as we were about to set off.

Arturo, we've just had a phone call from Andrew Nickolls. We had requested an interview with him and he's just called to say that he is unable to do that, he's not there at the moment, he is in a regional area looking after his elderly father, he's basically closing the company. It's effectively closed now. He said we have no contracts out. And I said so you're not cleaning any places at all, and he said no we're not. Does that surprise you?

Arturo: Not really. I think that's something that would be worth checking.

Ann Arnold: When I tell Arturo that Andrew Nickolls said if there are students who are owed money, they should send him an email, because he'd like to sort it out, Arturo isn't impressed.

Arturo: He actually once swore in his mother's name that he was going to make the payment. He swore by God also that he was going to do the payments. Of course the payments never arrived.

Ann Arnold: And you still haven't had that payment?

Arturo: No. It's been 20 months and we haven't had the payment yet.

Ann Arnold: Andrew Nickolls' call prompts Arturo to check his laptop for some old emails.

Arturo: I didn't remember keeping all of these but here they are. So, for example, this email that was sent on Thursday, September 18 of 2014. It says: 'Hi, I thought it was paid. I will check with accounts tomorrow.' So he kept on sending messages saying that he would make the payment. But he never did.

Ann Arnold: And in the one that says 'meet with Arturo', can you open that one up?

Arturo: Yeah, this was a number of meetings that he started scheduling with us. So he said, 'I'm really busy, I'm not going to be in the country, so can you come to the office on Thursday and we meet and settle everything?' So we went to the office and he wasn't there. And he did that four times.

Ann Arnold: That was despite Arturo telling Andrew Nickolls that, at that stage, he'd made a complaint to the Fair Work Ombudsman.

Well, now we'll go and see some of the places where you used to work, the places you used to clean, and it'll be interesting to see if any of them still believe that the Kleen Group is actually the cleaning contractor there. Because he just said no we're not doing any more cleaning now.

Arturo: Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised to find that he is still doing the cleaning for those places.

Here is the building. It's an apartment building, we did the cleaning in this part and we did the cleaning in the front of it. And we had to do this every day in the morning at seven in the morning.

Ann Arnold: You had to be here before seven in the morning?

Arturo: Yeah, we all had to start early in the morning. We came here, we did the cleaning of the toilets, also the windows, and then go to the floors and do the vacuum cleaning on every floor.

Ann Arnold: So once a week you had to do every floor of the building?

Arturo: Yeah.

Ann Arnold: How many floors?

Arturo: I think there are four or five, I don't remember really correctly.

Ann Arnold: And for three months you weren't paid here.

Arturo: No. So we did work every day, we arrived here every day and we didn't get any payment for doing that.

Ann Arnold: So this looks like the office of the building manager, is it?

Arturo: Yeah, they are the people who do the management. So this is the office of the building manager here. Yes, so, I'm not sure if they are here, maybe…

Ann Arnold: This turned out to be not quite right. Arturo and Kelly were given cleaning instructions by a man in this office, although it's a property development and executive rental company, not the office of the building manager. The man's name was Tony.

Arturo: Hello, how are you?

Woman: Hello.

Arturo: My name is Arturo, I used to work here as a cleaner for the building. We used to work with the company that's called Kleen Group. So we would like to speak with the building manager maybe, is it possible?

Woman: About?

Arturo: So there was a thing with underpayment, we weren't paid for some time for around three months. And we would like to talk to the manager.

Ann Arnold: A staff member who Arturo remembers as being helpful and friendly comes to the door.

Man: Well basically we don't look after the actual cleaning of the building, the strata company does. They're the ones that sort of look after it. And they've switched to a different cleaner. Yeah, Kleen Group didn't go too well. So we had a few issues, so the strata company switched them.

Ann Arnold: Can you say what those issues were, what was your understanding of that?

Woman: Tony wants you!

Man: Sorry, one second…

Ann Arnold: He is called away by Tony, his boss. And returns saying that he can't comment.

As we go to leave, the boss, Tony, approaches from the back of the office. We greet him with smiles.

He says nothing, grabs the office door, and slams it.

As that door closed, we realised it would not be straightforward establishing who hired and managed the cleaning contractor. I later asked the strata manager of that building about the cleaning contract, but he said that information was confidential.

Usually in strata buildings, strata managers provide quotes, then owners' corporations actually engage the contractor. It seems that neither strata managers or owners' corporations are legally responsible for how that contractor pays its cleaners.

We head to a furniture store on a busy road. The owners, Olga and Viktor, had been supportive of Arturo and Kelly's plight. The furniture store is a tenant in an apartment building that Arturo and Kelly cleaned.

Arturo: Hi, how are you?

Olga: Hello.

Arturo: So again here [laugh]. I came with Ann, she is from ABC.

Ann Arnold: Arturo reminds Olga about his situation.

Arturo: …working with Kleen Group, that they just stopped paying us for three months. So we are going through some places, we are talking to people to ask some questions about the relationship with them.

Olga: Yeah, well, the thing is we don't know them because he is just a company who sends people to us. But since you guys gone we spoke to a few other guys, and there was quite a few, every couple of weeks there's been another person coming and cleaning this building. And actually I warned them as well. I said, look, just to let you know that if you have this experience, of Kleen Group not paying you, then you shouldn't stay here. And they said oh really, okay, actually we haven't been paid for the last three weeks and four weeks or more. And straight away, a week later, there's been somebody else cleaning it.

Ann Arnold: When Arturo first left the job, over a year before, and was chasing his money, he thought maybe the company had run out of cash. But through Olga, he had established that Kleen Group paid the cleaners who replaced him, or at least they did at first.

Olga: Yeah, they sounded like Brazilians, a really nice friendly couple. They said, yeah we are having the same problems. And then they gave me their phone number which I passed on to you.

Arturo: Then what happened was I was in contact with them, and they told me that at the beginning they were paid. And then thereafter they weren't paid either. So they told us we are in a hurry because we are going to go back and we need the money.

Ann Arnold: It seems that Arturo and Kelly may not be the only people that Kleen Group failed to pay. The mobile number these replacement student cleaners had no longer works. We were unable to contact them. They've probably left the country.

Arturo believes that Kleen Group was strategically not paying student cleaners when their visas were due to expire, assuming the students could not pursue the payment from overseas. The students had provided copies of their visa when they were hired.

Background Briefing can't say this is what was happening but former Kleen Group supervisor Pedro confirms that there were other instances of payments ceasing around the time a cleaner's visa was about to expire.

Pedro: At the end of Arturo and Kelly's work with Kleen Group their visa was running out. So I didn't put those two together at the time, but I did notice that he did make a few payments to other cleaners instead of Arturo and Kelly. I don't know if he was aware of their visas expiring, it's most likely he was. Now thinking back, I can probably see that he was doing that but at the time I didn't notice.

Ann Arnold: What Pedro did notice was that meanwhile, Andrew Nickolls was pursuing his expensive hobby, car racing. Pedro was caught in the middle, with cleaners wanting payment.

Pedro: And I clarified to all of them that I wasn't in charge of finance, at all. I wish I was. Things would have been much different. Because I wouldn't pay $5,000 for a racing trailer instead of paying my staff.

Ann Arnold: What's that referring to, what was the racing trailer?

Pedro: We were getting complaints from several cleaners not getting paid, and we found several invoices for paid racing trailers, racing tyres, mechanical fees. We saw the invoices that were paid, $5,000, $2,500…

Ann Arnold: That were paid.

Pedro: Yes, they were paid, yeah, absolutely. Whatever was for his hobby was paid in full. But whenever we claimed money for payments to overdue workers, we only got excuses. At the end of my time with him he had a trailer, a campervan sort of thing like a motorhome with the logos of the company and everything, but still payments to people were not happening. He bought that racing ute while not paying to people.

Ann Arnold: Is this The Intimidator?

Pedro: Yeah, that's the one. [baby makes noise] Yeah, daddy thinks the same about The Intimidator!

Ann Arnold: I tried again to contact Andrew Nickolls.

Andrew Nickolls [recording]: Thank you for calling Andrew Nickolls. Please leave a message after the tone, and I will call you back shortly.

Ann Arnold: Hello Andrew, it's Ann Arnold here from Background Briefing at Radio National. Just chasing up, you also suggested that anyone owed money by you and your company should send you an email. Arturo has now done that, so just wondering if you've got that email, and if you're able to make that payment, and when you'll be doing that. And a few other questions about what was happening at Kleen Group over the last few years. So very keen to talk to you, please call me on…

In the furniture store that Arturo and Kelly used to clean, Olga questions how, ethically, Andrew Nickolls has been able to stay in business. She thought, like many people do, that it was the strata manager's duty to take action, and says she complained to them. One of the more recent cleaners had a young family, and he was missing a payment. Olga had told him he wasn't the first.

Olga: Yeah, he was like a Middle Eastern guy I think. And I spoke to him and he was really switched on and he said, look guys, you really need to talk to strata, to your strata. It's not fair and…

Ann Arnold: He was saying you should lobby and…

Olga: Yes, and we said we're really sorry - we did! I feel sorry for the guys. We told strata, and they didn't do anything. They're happy with the job that is done. Nobody complains, so…

Ann Arnold: A strata company's role is the administration of a building, on behalf of the owners' corporation. Background Briefing contacted the strata management company for Olga's building. The company did not want to comment publicly.

So where does the buck stop in strata buildings?

In bigger buildings, it's building managers who hire the cleaners directly.

Pedro, who has worked in building management, as well as for Kleen Group, says there are obvious incentives to go with the cheapest contract. And questions aren't asked about payment of cleaners.

Pedro: Because most building management companies will have the contract of cleaning attached to their building management site, if they get a company that hires people cash in hand, they can make a better profit.

Ann Arnold: So is there a responsibility there to not always go for the cheapest contractor, to ask if the cleaning contract is so cheap, ask how that is being achieved?

Pedro: Absolutely. But at the same time every owner that forms the owners' corporations, they don't really care, they just want the cheapest cost, so they don't need to pay so much strata fees at the end of the day. So it's a vicious circle.

Ann Arnold: More broadly, when there is a chain of companies involved in hiring a contractor who underpays their staff, those companies must take some responsibility, argues Redfern Legal Centre lawyer Sean Stimson.

Sean Stimson: There is almost a component, we feel, of wilful blindness. And that is if you look at there being a contract that has been agreed to, it's usually calculated on the amount of hours that it's going to take to complete that contract. When that party is receiving the quotes for the work, they must look at the quote and say how can that job be done for that particular money.

Ann Arnold: Under the Fair Work Act, other parties might be liable for employment exploitation if they are knowingly concerned or involved.

Meanwhile, Olga is doing what she can for Arturo, who used to clean her furniture store and wasn't paid for three months. Her store paid Kleen Group directly. She checks the invoices, and establishes the last payment to Kleen Group was 10 March this year. She'd had no notification that Kleen Group would no longer clean her store.

Then, she spots something.

Olga: Okay, actually, interesting…paid in March, and then we got the reply from the accountant, and she said, 'hi, thanks for payment, can you please note our new bank account details on the invoice, as we will be shutting the other account soon'.

Ann Arnold: This new Kleen Group bank account could be valuable information for Arturo. Nine months earlier, the NSW Local Court issued a garnishee order, a requirement for Kleen Group's bank to provide Arturo and Kelly with $9,125 each from a Kleen Group account. But there was only $160 there. Maybe the new account would offer more.

Olga: So do you want me to print this letter?

Ann Arnold: Sure, thank you. We will continue investigating.

Olga: Okay. Good luck.

Arturo: Thank you very much.

Ann Arnold: And Olga you're okay with…you're not concerned about if they complain back to you or the strata complains to you?

Olga: No. Whatever needs to be done, needs to be done, because even though maybe strata is happy with the work, we get it all done, but obviously what is fair…yeah, people who work need to be paid.

Ann Arnold: So you're prepared to take a stand.

Olga: Yeah, of course. Yes.

Ann Arnold: Fist pump! Thanks Olga.

Arturo: Thank you very much.

Olga: Thank you so much.

Ann Arnold: Sean Stimson, the Redfern Legal Centre lawyer who specialises in international student cases, will be chasing up the new Kleen Group bank account.

We've now been given a new account number, is that useful for you to be able to pursue another garnishee order?

Sean Stimson: Yes absolutely. I mean, that's going to give us the possibility that we can attach a garnishee order to that, and that's something that we are looking into now. That only came to light through your investigations last week.

Ann Arnold: 70% of the international student employment problems seen by Redfern Legal Centre concern cleaning jobs. But only the fortunate few find their way to this free legal help. Sean Stimson has no doubt that there is a very big problem not being addressed.

Sean Stimson: If I see someone working in the cleaning industry or moving trolleys, I just had my business card to them and say if you need to talk, if anything doesn't feel right, then give us a call and there's our number, Redfern Legal Centre. And by handing the card to one person, hopefully it will be passed on to a dozen more.

Ann Arnold: Do you imagine that a lot of those people may well be having problems of one kind or another, are probably struggling with their life here?

Sean Stimson: Yeah, I do, I absolutely think so. I mean, you can see as soon as you hand the card over they start to ask questions, and quite often they become quite in-depth questions as to employment conditions. So you may be asked about hourly rates. So, very much you can see that they are concerned as to the situation that they find themselves in.

Ann Arnold: Arturo's friend and former cleaning partner, Kelly, was able to join us for a Saturday visit to Mosman Rugby Club, to meet club president Tim Martin.

Ann Arnold: Hello Tim.

Tim Martin: Nice to meet you.

Arturo: Arturo.

Tim Martin: Arturo, nice to meet you.

Kelly: Kelly.

Tim Martin: Hey Kelly, how you doing?

Ann Arnold: So Arturo and Kelly used to clean here, you probably haven't met them…

Tim Martin: No, in fact I don't think I've met anybody who did any of the cleaning here. So the situation I think from our perspective, about I'm gonna say 6 years ago, maybe 6 or 7 years ago, Kleen Group offered to sponsor us, through a contact, and I honestly don't remember who that was. And their sponsorship was in the form of…they provided cleaning for free. Three years ago that situation changed and it just became a standard commercial arrangement.

Ann Arnold: So you were paying them from then on.

Tim Martin: So we've been paying them for the last three years, up to the end of last season, and we terminated the arrangement at the end of last season.

Ann Arnold: Tim Martin says the contract was terminated with Kleen Group because towards the end there were problems with the quality of the work. But the rugby club paid the company in full, right up until then.

Tim Martin: Yeah, I'm disappointed to hear that obviously you guys weren't looked after, because we paid the contractor, but I guess we don't have a lot of control as to what happens after that.

Ann Arnold: Arturo and I went on a weekday to the Kleen Group office site. Although Andrew Nickolls had told me that same morning on the phone that he was in a regional area and the company wasn't operating, Arturo wasn't buying it.

Arturo: We are very close, I think the next one is turning left. Chaplin Drive, there it is. Yep. Here it is. And there is the van, there is a Kleen Group van parked in front of the…

Ann Arnold: You saw one.

Arturo: Yeah, yep.

Ann Arnold: A-ha okay, interesting.

At the office, we rang the bell but there was no response. The main interest for Arturo was the van. It was the exact one he and Kelly used to drive. There was a bunch of Kleen Group flyers on the dashboard. And the van was full of cleaning equipment.

Arturo: So if you were out of business you would leave everything inside of the store, I guess. And also if they are out of business they would have the other van here. Where is the other van? Maybe working, I guess.

Ann Arnold: We were unable to establish if Kleen Group is still in business. We found no evidence of them working, but the company is still registered as a business, and at one stage it worked in several states.

Andrew Nickolls has not yet received an arrest warrant. The application is with the Sheriff's Office.

Arturo is not alone in pursuing Andrew Nickolls through the courts. A former Kleen Group manager—not Pedro—is also seeking unpaid wages. In that case, the Federal Court fined Kleen Group more than $20,000, and fined Andrew Nickolls himself $5,000 for not providing documentation to the Fair Work Ombudsman. Judge Emmet said it was imperative that employers comply with the Ombudsman's requests to produce information, so that investigations can be done. That Kleen Group manager's case remains unresolved.

There's also been trouble in the Northern Territory. Background Briefing spoke to former Darwin clients of Kleen Group and was told of student cleaners sleeping in a building instead of working because they were not being paid. And of a team of backpackers who were not paid for a one-off construction clean of a Darwin waterfront building.

Meanwhile, the Australian Taxation Office is also after Kleen Group. It's applied to the Federal Court to have the company wound up.

Reading: A newly released Bondi apartment development has sold 10 of its 16 apartments, with downsizers appearing to be some of the more active buyers. The boutique development is a north-facing block that includes views of the Royal Sydney Golf Course to the CBD, with 180-degree harbour views.

Ann Arnold: The building was completed late last year. When external construction was finished, a team of Mongolian cleaners was hired for the initial clean. Most were students. Some worked two weeks or more. More than six months later, they have not been paid.

Sara: The one guy actually he was supervising us, he was telling us what to do.

Ann Arnold: Sara—not her real name—was one of four cleaners who started there. Others would follow. They had to buy protective clothing, hard hats and boots.

Sara: We worked there for two weeks. The initial cleaning I think it was so hard, everything covered with the dust, and it was so hard.

Ann Arnold: And this is because it's a new construction. The building has just been finished. And that's why you need the helmets and…

Sara: And then they are also, the outside is finished, but the inside there is still construction work, still processing. And for the first week we just cleaned all the balconies and the windows. And the second week, we did the cupboards and the bathrooms, yeah.

Ann Arnold: The Mongolian students travelled over an hour to get there each day, and the public transport costs added up. But they figured it was worth it, because they'd been hired on individual contracts that appeared to pay well. But Sara said the work then stopped. They asked the supervisor for their pay.

Sara: He didn't say no. And then he said okay, I will send you the money. Then finally we understood everything was lie. He kept like telling lies, all that time. 'Okay, I send you tomorrow.' 'I'll send you on Monday.' 'I already sent you into your account.' But we didn't get any money into our account, and we kept asking. It took more than one month, then finally we understood that okay he's not getting paid for us.

Ann Arnold: While this was outright non-payment, Sara says underpayment of international students is widespread.

Sara: I think there must be some standards of the hourly rates. But every places where I go, they always ask me the lower rate. Like $13, $12. I heard like maximum was $15.

Ann Arnold: What kind of jobs?

Sara: Just like the restaurant, the waitress, the food runners, kitchen hands.

Ann Arnold: Cleaning? Did you try for any other cleaning jobs?

Sara: Cleaning as well, yes. Not just me, my friends and my husband, he has been many places. Normally the payment is like this.

Ann Arnold: Do you or your husband or your friends ever say why don't you pay the minimum wage?

Sara: I don't know. I don't know, we just think okay. Maybe some places they are not big enough, or successful enough. Maybe that's why they just want to pay less.

Ann Arnold: That's not the case with the commercial cleaning company that Sara and her friends were working for, on the Bondi job. The company boasts on its website that it is now doing the construction clean for an environmental award-winning building in the Sydney CBD. It employed a contractor to do the construction clean of the Bondi building last year. It was the contractor, the cleaning company says, who hired the Mongolian cleaners.

Lawyers from Clayton Utz, who are now representing the Mongolian group, had contacted the supervisor and not had a response. Sara says she had on several occasions contacted the cleaning company as well about not being paid, with little effect.

But once the company realised there was media interest, there was action. I rang them after meeting Sara. One of the directors said he didn't want his company name associated with non-payment of labour. He would speak to the contractor who hired the Mongolians. Later that day, the contractor rang the Clayton Utz lawyers and began settlement negotiations. Because of that, we have agreed not to report the name of the company.

For the time being, cleaning companies will continue, it seems, to do well out of international students. Pedro, who worked for Kleen Group and elsewhere, is seeing illegal underpayment and over-work all the time. He says there's one cleaning company that employs mostly Nepalese cleaners, working 6 or 7 days a week on a flat rate of $17 an hour, cash.

Pedro: So they work them cash in hand. They really exploit them.

Ann Arnold: Because he works in the industry, Pedro doesn't want to name that cleaning company. But he's deeply troubled by the lack of protection these students have in the black market.

Pedro: The point is that if those guys were employed legally, at least they would be paying taxes, they would have access to holiday, to sick leave, and to be protected under the law. When now, if they lose their job they're in the street.

Ann Arnold: And that cleaning company manager, when you raised that, what did they say?

Pedro: He said it's okay don't worry, they want to work these hours because they need the money. But it is not the point about needing the money, it's about you have somebody working seven days a week and you are doing the wrong thing because you're exploiting the person, that person is going to get tired and hurt. And what happens to them after? You don't care, you don't have any legal attachment to them, when I'm the one that spends every day with that person. It shouldn't happen. That should not happen. Any person working in Australia should be protected by the law.

Ann Arnold: Pedro's parents are Argentinian. His wife is from Taiwan. She came here as a student and worked in a cafe for $10 per hour, underpaid just like the majority of students in the Sydney University Business School survey.

Pedro reckons one solution is that cleaning companies should be audited, because you can't leave it to concerned citizens to report bad employment practices.

Pedro: And companies, maybe they should be audited more often, to see how many workers do they have on the field, how many of those are paid, how are they paid. I think it's really hard to ask for the population to actually turn around and say hey, this person should be paid better. Even though that's what should happen, we are humans and not all humans think we need to do the right thing. Most humans will say, well, if it's not costing me as much, I'm okay with that.

Ann Arnold: Few international students have the confidence to challenge the status quo in an unfamiliar country. Sara from Mongolia decided to speak to Background Briefing after many in her group of fellow cleaners declined.

Sara: I just think there are a lot of students struggling with this problem. So I just want to let the people who are responsible for this, just they need to know that like lot of international students, they are like having problems to get paid fairly. So please do something. Please try to pay your attention in this case, and help us to get paid fairly.

Ann Arnold: Background Briefing's coordinating producer is Linda McGinness, research by Tim Roxburgh, technical production this week Judy Rapley, our executive producer is Wendy Carlisle. I'm Ann Arnold.