The bundle of behaviours called wage theft refers to employer non-compliance with minimum standards in base wages, loadings, overtime or superannuation. While widespread, wage theft is not gender neutral. The behaviour involved most commonly and most significantly affects low paid employees in part-time and casual work—all groups in which women predominate.
The Government has recently issued a Discussion Paper canvassing penalties for wage theft. However, in our view neither the discussion paper nor the proposed remedies came to terms with the extent and implications of non-compliance with legal wage and entitlements requirements. For this reason, we welcome the opportunity offered by this Inquiry to extend the national conversation on wage theft beyond the limited proposals raised in the discussion paper.
The Attorney-General’s discussion paper presents a partial picture of the extent of the problem of wage theft. It recurs to the ‘bad apple’ view of non-compliance among ‘a small number of employers’, which treats wage theft as aberrant and non-systemic. This view ignores available research: as the data in this document indicates, wage theft is endemic to the point of contributing to the national problem of chronic low wage growth (McKenzie, 2018).
Wage theft is endemic in Australia and a contributor to the persistent low wage growth undermining the national economy (McKenzie, 2018). It has a massive direct impact on employees who lose entitlements (on average $10,789 for each affected employee) and costs taxpayers over $600m annually (PwC, 2012, iii).
NFAW is concerned about the financial security of women, and the role of superannuation in achieving that security. To that end we have made a number of submissions to previous Parliamentary and Treasury enquiries into the superannuation system and to the Senate Inquiry into the Financial Security of Women in Retirement.
NFAW notes that a number of employer associations are attempting to rely in their submissions on views expressed in the recently released Productivity Commission report on the Workplace RelationsFramework.
