Chicken is cheap in Australian supermarkets and fast food outlets for a logical reason. They are illegally processed at Third World labour rates by Third World scab labour.
Labour hire firms/agents are criminally exploiting Australia’s visa laws by contracting low-cost asians on holiday visas to work for $11 an hour processing chickens for Australian consumption.
Cheap Chook processed by Third Worlders with poor sanitation in sweat shops
This is happening in Australia, while the union movement turns a blind eye so long as the employer pays into union slush funds. This is worse than Work Choices. This is foreign slavery and union corruption.
AWA, CFMEU, HSU – the ACTU is an umbrella corrupt body. It’s boss Ged Kearney needs to be sacked and the ACTU wound up and replaced by a trustworthy grassroots body worthy of Australian-only workers and their dependent families, not steered by party politics allowing foreign scabs to undercut and replace Aussie workers.
Ged Kearney as useless as tits on a bull
Australia’s Fair Work Ombudsman has found exploitative battery chicken manufacturer, Baiada Group, which produces Steggles and Lilydale brands, used a complex web of labour hire arrangements to outsource illegal scab labour at three processing plants in regional New South Wales.
Baiada is Australia’s largest poultry processor and was strongly criticised last week for exploiting its workforce by the Fair Work Ombudsman, through a chain of fly-by-night foreign scab labour hire contractors.
The Fair Work Ombudsman found illegal scab labour working at several poultry plants owned and operated by the Baiada Group including at Beresfield, Hanwood and Tamworth in regional New South Wales.
Chinese are being paid just $11.50 per hour to work shifts of up to 19 hours a day.
A report from the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO) into shonky practices of the Baiada Group has reported the following key findings:
- Non-compliance with a range of Commonwealth workplace laws
- Very poor or no governance arrangements relating to the various labour supply chains
- Exploitationofalabourpool that is comprised predominantly of overseas workers in Australia on 417 working holiday visas, involving:
- significant underpayments
- extremely long hours of work
- high rents for overcrowded and unsafe worker accommodation
- discrimination
- misclassification of employees as contractors.
Baiada Group allegedly arranged verbal agreements with a list of labour hire operators, which sourced workers on 417 working holiday visas, mostly from Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Many workers reported they were unable to work unless they rented accommodation from the labour hire contractors and it is alleged rent was illegally deducted from their wages.
In one case, a property purchased in March 2012 for $370,000 was found to be sleeping 21 people who were each paying $100 a week, possibly generating $100,000 a year.
The FWO said the labour hire contractors did not engage with the inquiry and “produced inadequate, inaccurate and/or fabricated records to Inspectors”.
The report notes the means of finding and recruiting workers was also suspect and targeted. “The overseas workers were primarily recruited by sub-contractors through Chinese newspapers, Facebook or Taiwanese backpacker websites,” the report said. “The advertisements frequently asked applicants to respond with details of their nationality, height and weight and were potentially discriminatory.”
The FWO found Baiada used a sophisticated system of outsourcing and labour hire deals.
Baiada produces the Lilydale, Select and Steggles chicken brands, and is one of Australia’s largest poultry companies with around a 20 per cent market share supplying Coles, Woolworths, McDonald’s and others.
As of October 2013, the report says, Baiada claimed to have verbal agreements with six principal contractors – B & E Poultry Holdings Pty Ltd, Mushland Pty Ltd, JL Poultry Pty Ltd, VNJ Foods Pty Ltd, Evergreenlee Pty Ltd and Pham Poultry (AUS) Pty Ltd. The agreements were reportedly not written and signed, but relied on trust.
Can you trust where you by your chicken?
These companies in turn sub-contracted to at least seven other entities, with some further sub-contracting the poultry deals another two or three tiers, involving up to 34 separate entities overall.
The investigation found that Baiada paid its principal contractors illegally a unit rate per kilogram of poultry processed, rather than on an hourly rate, thus ignoring Australian workplace laws and denying penalty rates for night shifts, weekends or public holidays.
So Australians are buying battery chooks processed by foreign slave labour. Nice.
Bill Shorten’s union movement has turned a blind eye to foreign labour hire companies inviting foreign unskilled Turd Worlders to arrive in Australia to scab low paid food manufacturing jobs from Australians at slave labour rates.
Foreign scab labour hire companies expect to pay no tax under Tony Abbott’s TPP arrangements.
Cheap Asian workers in Baiada poultry plant are being encouraged to lodge bogus refugee visa applications to extend their stay in Australia.
For Instance, Malaysian workers at Baiada’s poultry plant in Beresfield, near Newcastle, have been charged up to $3,500 by their labour hire agency to file an application for a protection visa. When the visa is declined an appeal is lodged and the workers are able to extend their stay by up to 18 months.
Chook mafia: “You get the right to work and you don’t need to pay the student fees.”
Northern NSW Meatworkers Union secretary Grant Courtney described the applications as a scam. “It’s a clear rort … and clearly companies that are using these sorts of workers are very, very much aware of it,” he said.
Some employees were working 18 hours a day for as little as $11 an hour.
Obscene scab chook profits to fat cats