It seems that every day another employer cheating their employees of wages hits the headlines. This is surely what prompted the Attorney-General’s Department to release discussion papers calling for new penalties to combat wage theft.
The papers suggest harsher penalties that are impossible for larger companies to ignore and to discourage worker exploitation happening in the first place.
Those punishments include million-dollar fines for guilty businesses, as well as being forced to display public notices detailing what the fine was for. On a personal level, directors of these companies could lose their jobs and face from five to 10 years in prison. If they’re found exploiting migrants, the papers recommend even harsher penalties.
“Those who oversee migrant exploitation specifically could face even harsher repercussions, including being banned and publicly shamed including the requirement to “display a notice admitting to having underpaid their employees.”
On behalf of everyone who’s ever had to scrape every penny together, working whatever they could find to fit around uni classes – good. Public shaming, indeed.
“The Government considers it unacceptable that there is a persistence of underpayment and exploitation behaviours by a small number of employers and considers there to now be a strong case that the current penalty, compliance, and enforcement framework for breaches of the Fair Work Act… needs to be improved,” the Attorney-General’s Department wrote.
Drag ’em Sis!
