Seasonal Workers in Need of Union Solidarity

Article by: Hari Yellina (Orchard Tech)

On October 1 of this year, the federal government announced a new agricultural worker visa designed to give Australian farmers access to labourers from countries that are part of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Known as the “Ag Visa,” the new arrangement is supposed to complement existing visa arrangements, like the Seasonal Workers’ Program (SWP) and the Pacific Labour Scheme (PLS). More specifically, it is supposed to compensate for the shortfall of labourers that resulted from recent changes to the Working Holiday Maker following recent negotiations concluded between Australia and the UK. The federal minister for agriculture, David Littleproud, declared that this constitutes the “biggest structural change to the agricultural workforce in our nation’s history.”

What makes it so vastly different from the SWP and PLS is that it not only grants workers a limited ability to move between employers, but also a pathway to permanent residency. However, Michele O’Neill from the Australian Council of Trade Unions has condemned the arrangement as introducing a “second-class workforce.” Deregulation of agricultural production reached its peak in the mid-1990s. Since then, Australian farmers have increasingly depended on low-paid temporary migrant workers with either fewer rights or a diminished ability to defend their rights. In the 2000s, both Labor and Liberal governments introduced changes accelerating this trend.

Instead, the difficulty is better understood as a labour supply problem — which is to say that farmers can’t find the kind of workers they want. When interviewed about the kind of workers they need, farmers don’t list hard skills or physical traits as desirable worker qualities. Instead, they look for a certain “attitude” — namely, compliance and a willingness to accept substandard pay and conditions. The SWP and PLS were designed to ensure the availability of this kind of compliant workforce. Because seasonal workers’ stay in Australia is temporary, they face considerable barriers to organizing. And at the same time, these schemes tied workers to single employers, making it difficult to defend their rights or leave exploitative situations.