Australian “Free Range” Chicken Company Alleged to Use Exploited Labor [View all]

Australian “Free Range” Chicken Company Alleged to Use Exploited Labor
by Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch Blog
May 11th, 2015

Baiada, one of Australia’s biggest poultry producers, has been accused of using labor contractors that under pay and exploit foreign visitors on temporary work permits. The company sells Steggles and Lilydale Free Range Chickens to supermarket and fast food chains like Aldi, Coles, KFC and Woolworths.

Australia has a temporary “working holiday” visa system designed to help young people from 19 different countries subsidize up to a year of travel in Australia. Today unscrupulous employers have taken advantage of this so-called “subclass 417” visa system to employ an estimated 150,000 low wage migrant workers from Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan as well as from Europe.

“They are lured into a (travel) agency. The agency, for a cost, sets up the trip. They set up the accommodation when they get here. And they set them up with work when they get here on the promise that all is going to be well,” Tony Snelson, National Union of Workers, told Four Corners, an investigative program on Australian Broadcasting Corporation television.

“It's not an Australia that we would put on the tourism brochures,” Joanna Howe, a senior lecturer at the University of Adelaide law school told the TV station. “There's a whole lot of working holiday makers performing low-skilled jobs - dirty, demeaning, difficult jobs - for which they get paid very little.”

More:
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=16025