Via Domain:

Job insecurity is no longer confined to low-skilled workers, but is emerging in highly skilled professions including law and computer programming, a leading US employment expert has warned. David Weil from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University in Boston and a visiting professor at the University of Sydney Business School is in Australia talking to academics and policy makers. He is warning them that the employment rights of highly skilled professionals are under threat with job insecurity now “working its way up the skill ladder”. …Professor Weil, who was the head of the US Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division under the Obama Administration, said the US and Australia shared the same problem of enforcing laws against wage theft, or when employers deliberately underpay workers and refuse to pay compulsory benefits such as superannuation. Professor Weil’s department had 1000 investigators charged with regulating more than seven million workplaces. In Australia, the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO) has 250 investigators overseeing 2.1 million businesses. He said agencies like the FWO could not tackle wage theft on its own and needed to partner with other organisations to protect workers. “The whole challenge is how you use those limited resources in better ways,” he said. “How do you act bigger than you are in order to get some handle on improving workplace conditions. “You can have nice laws on the books, but if you don’t have staff to enforce them and laws that you are using to effect … you will never have enough resources to actually make the regulations to protect workers reality.” In the US, his agency started using some existing labour laws, which had been largely ignored, to double the amount of damages underpaid workers received. This helped create a deterrent effect. His department also became proactive in investigating industries that employed migrant workers who rarely complained about exploitation. While his department did not “solve” the wage theft problem, it had made significant improvements in enforcement.

Quite right. There is no regulating it. Pumping cheap foreign labour in at a breakneck pace is too big a macro driver for regulation to cope with. There was one unprecedented change to Australian macro conditions in this cycle that made wage growth impossible. Australia has never run mass immigration into material economic slack before but that’s what we did this time:

What does macro-economics 101 tell us happens when a perpetual supply shock lands on weak demand? Prices fall.

Piles of micr0-economic evidence also supports the contention that the mass immigration model does not do wage rises:

Academic research also supports it. Below are key excepts from Chapter 13 entitled Temporary migrant workers (TMWs), underpayment and predatory business models, written by Iain Campbell:

This chapter argues that the expansion of temporary labour migration is a significant development in Australia and that it has implications for wage stagnation… Three main facts about their presence in Australia are relevant to the discussion of wage stagnation. First, there are large numbers of TMWs in Australia, currently around 1.2 million persons. Second, those numbers have increased strongly over the past 15 years. Third, when employed, many TMWs are subject to exploitation, including wage payments that fall below — sometimes well below — the minimum levels specified in employment regulation… One link to slow wages growth, as highlighted by orthodox economics, stems from the simple fact of increased numbers, which add to labour supply and thereby help to moderate wages growth. This chapter argues, however, that the more salient point concerns the way many TMWs are mistreated within the workplace in industry sectors such as food services, horticulture, construction, personal services and cleaning. TMW underpayments, which appear both widespread in these sectors and systemic, offer insights into labour market dynamics that are also relevant to the general problem of slow wages growth… Official stock data indicate that the visa programmes for international students, temporary skilled workers and working holiday makers have tripled in numbers since the late 1990s… In all, the total number of TMWs in Australia is around 1.2 million persons. If we include New Zealand citizens and permanent residents, who can enter Australia under a special subclass 444 visa, without time limits on their stay and with unrestricted work rights (though without access to most social security payments), then the total is close to 2 million persons… TMWs now make up around 6% of the total Australian workforce… Decisions by the federal Coalition government under John Howard to introduce easier pathways to permanent residency for temporary visa holders, especially international students and temporary skilled workers, gave a major impetus to TMW visa programmes. Most international students and temporary skilled workers, together with many working holiday makers, see themselves as involved in a project of ‘staggered’ or ‘multi-step’ migration, whereby they hope to leap from their present status into a more long-term visa status, ideally permanent residency. One result, as temporary migration expands while the permanent stream remains effectively capped, is a lengthening queue of onshore applicants for permanent residency… Though standard accounts describe Australian immigration as oriented to skilled labour, this characterisation stands at odds with the abundant evidence on expanding temporary migration and the character of TMW jobs. It is true that many TMWs, like their counterparts in the permanent stream, are highly qualified and in this sense skilled. However, the fact that their work is primarily in lower-skilled jobs suggests that it is more accurate, as several scholars point out, to speak of a shift in Australia towards a de facto low-skilled migration programme… A focus on raw numbers of TMWs may miss the main link to slow wages growth. It is the third point concerning underpayments and predatory business models that seems richest in implications. This point suggests, first and most obviously, added drag on wages growth in sectors where such underpayments and predatory business models have become embedded. If they become more widely practised, underpayments pull down average hourly wages. If a substantial number of firms in a specific labour market intensify strategies of labour cost minimisation by pushing wage rates below the legal floor, it can unleash a dynamic of competition around wage rates that foreshadows wage decline rather than wage growth for employees… Increases in labour supply allow employers in sectors already oriented to flexible and low-wage employment, such as horticulture and food services, to sustain and extend strategies of labour cost minimisation… The arguments and evidence cited above suggest a spread of predatory business models within low-wage industries.37 They suggest an unfolding process of degradation in these labour markets…

And below are extracts from Chapter 14, entitled Is there a wages crisis facing skilled temporary migrants?, by Joanna Howe:

Scarcely a day goes by without another headline of wage theft involving temporary migrant workers… In this chapter we explore a largely untold story in relation to temporary migrant workers… it exposes a very real wages crisis facing workers on the Temporary Skill Shortage (TSS) visa (formerly the 457 visa) in Australia. This crisis has been precipitated by the federal government’s decision to freeze the salary floor for temporary skilled migrant workers since 2013… the government has chosen to put downward pressure on real wages for temporary skilled migrants, thereby surreptitiously allowing the TSS visa to be used in lower-paid jobs… In Australia, these workers are employed via the TSS visa and they must be paid no less than a salary floor. This salary floor is called the Temporary Skilled Migration Income Threshold (TSMIT). TSMIT was introduced in 2009 in response to widespread concerns during the Howard Government years of migrant worker exploitation. This protection was considered important because an independent review found that many 457 visa workers were not receiving wages equivalent to those received by Australian workers… In effect, TSMIT is intended to act as a proxy for the skill level of a particular occupation. It prevents unscrupulous employers misclassifying an occupation at a higher skill level in order to employ a TSS visa holder at a lower level… TSMIT’s protective ability is only as strong as the level at which it is set. In its original iteration back in 2009, it was set at A$45 220. This level was determined by reference to average weekly earnings for Australians, with the intention that TSMIT would be pegged to this because the Australian government considered it ‘important that TSMIT keep pace with wage growth across the Australian labour market’. This indexation occurred like clockwork for five years. But since 1 July 2013, TSMIT has been frozen at a level of A$53 900. .. There is now a gap of more than A$26 000 between the salary floor for temporary skilled migrant workers and annual average salaries for Australian workers. This means that the TSS visa can increasingly be used to employ temporary migrant workers in occupations that attract a far lower salary than that earned by the average Australian worker. This begs the question — is the erosion of TSMIT allowing the TSS visa to morph into a general labour supply visa rather than a visa restricted to filling labour market gaps in skilled, high-wage occupations?.. But why would employers go to all the effort of hiring a temporary migrant worker on a TSS visa over an Australian worker? Renowned Australian demographer Graeme Hugo observed that employers ‘will always have a “demand” for foreign workers if it results in a lowering of their costs’. The simplistic notion that employers will only go to the trouble and expense of making a TSS visa application when they want to meet a skill shortage skims over a range of motives an employer may have for using the TSS visa. These could be a reluctance to invest in training for existing or prospective staff, or a desire to move towards a deunionised workforce. Additionally, for some employers, there could be a belief that, despite the requirement that TSS visa workers be employed on equivalent terms to locals, it is easier to avoid paying market salary rates and conditions for temporary migrant workers who have been recognised as being in a vulnerable labour market position. A recent example of this is the massive underpayments of chefs and cooks employed by Australia’s largest high-end restaurant business, Rockpool Dining Group, which found that visa holders were being paid at levels just above TSMIT but well below the award when taking into account the amount of overtime being done… Put simply, temporary demand for migrant workers often creates a permanent need for them in the labour market. Research shows that in industries where employers have turned to temporary migrants en masse, it erodes wages and conditions in these industries over time, making them less attractive to locals… A national survey of temporary migrant workers found that 24% of 457 visa holders who responded to the survey were paid less than A$18 an hour. Not only are these workers not being paid in according with TSMIT, but they are also receiving less than the minimum wage. A number of cases also expose creative attempts by employers to subvert TSMIT. Given the challenges many temporary migrants face in accessing legal remedies, these cases are likely only scratching the surface in terms of employer non-compliance with TSMIT… Combined, then, with the problems with enforcement and compliance, it is not hard to conclude that the failure to index TSMIT is contributing to a wages crisis for skilled temporary migrant workers… So the failure to index the salary floor for skilled migrant workers is likely to affect wages growth for these workers, as well as to have broader implications for all workers in the Australian labour market.

It’s not just temporary visas. It is the entire mass immigration model:

students, visa holders, tourists all work for nothing to gain longer terms visas;

their numbers are endless and so is the labour supply shock;

and that endless flow has now generated a supply side adjustment to businesses that thrive on cheap foreign labour – basically service economy dross – that holds up empty calorie growth, boosts asset prices and the currency, holds own productivity via capital shallowing, and hollows out tradables in an era of global lowflation.

Thus everybody can get some work, nobody can get enough of it, participation skyrockets but productivity craters. Wages can’t rise and the economy spirals, literally, into a dumbening singularity.

Here’s the list of professions that are most likely to join the wage theft ranks. Ironically, it is anything that is not marked “no shortage (NS)”:

Anything and everything with a supposed shortage will be flooded with cheap foreign competition imminently and pricing power, as well as industrial relations standards, of workers collapse.