A team of eight Fair Work Ombudsman inspectors from around Australia has descended on Shepparton to ensure local orchards and vineyards and associated labour hire companies are meeting their obligations to workers.
Surprise inspections of agricultural businesses around Shepparton this week aimed to highlight the importance of growers’ obligations to their staff’s working conditions.
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Inspectors for the national Fair Work Ombudsman made the swoop from Monday, March 18 until Friday, March 21 as part of its ongoing campaign of making unannounced inspections of horticulture farms and vineyards in regions Australia-wide.
About 20 farms, orchards and vineyards were visited in this area. The properties inspected grow a range of produce including apples, pears, stone fruits, citrus and tomatoes. Viticulture businesses were also inspected.
Businesses were selected to be assessed for compliance with workplace laws based on intelligence such as anonymous reports indicating potential worker underpayments in the region’s agriculture sector, or because they employ visa holder workers who can be vulnerable.
Inspectors spoke with growers, labour hire operators, managers and employees on the ground, and requested records.
They were on alert for low rates of pay that breach the Horticulture or the Wine Industry Award (where applicable), including with regard to piece rates; unauthorised deductions from wages; potential non-payment of overtime and inadequate breaks; payslip and record-keeping breaches and more.
Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth said no particular group or commodity was being targeted and that responses and outcomes differed between regions across the country.
Ms Booth said return trips to various areas found a “mixed bag” of responses to earlier inspections, with some regions remaining stubbornly non-compliant and others implementing improved workplace practices.
“We have found sometimes that a whole region has cleaned its act up, which makes a difference in their horticultural production area,” she said.
“However, for others, they have stayed the same.”
From December 2021 to October 2023, the FWO issued $316,860 in fines nationally and recovered $72,301 in unpaid wages.
“Our first reaction is not to ask what kind of enforcement process we can embark upon here, but rather ‘what can we help you with to sustain guided compliance where possible?’,” Ms Booth said.
“Has there been just an honest mistake? If so, we will help to rectify it and move on.
“We still want the employer to make good to the employee and act on any advice in the future.”
Ms Booth said there was no patterns of non-compliance within growers of particular crops but there had been extra attention to the use of labour hire companies, with 45 per cent of investigations being into those companies.
Labour hire companies accounted for 70 per cent of non-compliance cases found and 88 per cent of infringement notices.
“And the farmers themselves — even though they are not the labour hire company — they need to know what the hirers’ practices are; are the workers getting payslips and that sort of thing,” Ms Booth said.
“What’s important is the types of non-compliance that occur and to understand those which were serious breaches.
“For example, there may have been no records kept at all, employees not knowing who their employer was or being paid cash-in-hand.
“Both we and the Labour Hire Authority are very big on this.”
The Labour Hire Authority is an independent statutory authority responsible for licensing and regulating labour hire services in Victoria.
“I suppose the noticeable thing is the new level of penalties, but we are not trying to catch people and impose penalties in the first instance,” Ms Booth said.
“If there are isolated incidents we will issue compliance notices.”
Under new ‘closing loopholes’ laws, current maximum penalties per contravention for not following a compliance notice are:
$18,780 for an individual;
$93,900 for a small business; and
$469,500 for a non-small business.
From January 1, new criminal penalties will include:
A maximum fine for an individual of $1.565 million or three times the amount of underpayment owed to workers if it is a larger amount; and/or imprisonment for up to 10 years.
A maximum fine limit for a company of $7.825 million or three times the amount of underpayment owed to workers if it is a larger amount.
“The point is that it is big dollars,” Ms Booth said.
“If an individual has criminally underpaid, then they can go to gaol for up to ten years.
“But we want to work with people to get it right and (the penalties) should get people to sit up and get their house in order.
“It’s all about educating, giving support, information and advice to employers, not about prosecuting.”
Ms Booth praised the national farmers group Fair Farms which she said was very active in farming workplace practices.
“It’s a terrific organisation. It is not a government body but made up of farmers and they are very active in allowing their members to be more mindful of their obligations with the labour they engage.”
Fair Farms is industrially owned and offers the only Australian training and certification program for fair and ethical employment practices.
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