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Hungry Travellers in Australia
Travel feature - story about the bad conditions of working holiday makers...
It had been easy for Angel Daden to find a door-to-door sales job when she arrived in Australia, but making money was another thing, and after three weeks, during which she had only managed to scrape enough to survive, she quit. Then it took her two months of traipsing around Melbourne - visiting cafes, restaurants, bars, temping agencies, and so on - before she finally struck another job in a kebab joint. It would be hard - to start with, this lifelong vegetarian had to handle meat all day, and she had to cut the fingernails she tended so meticulously - and Angel tried to muster the earnestness needed to prove herself in a probationary week. Every night that week Angel returned home reeking of animal fat; it was in her clothes, in her hair, and you could also smell it on her skin. At the end of the week the Vietnamese manager made her an offer of employment: sixty hours weekly at AU$6 (œ2.50) per hour. Rent and bills would gobble half her salary, and it would be almost impossible to save enough to travel round Australia even for a short whirlwind tour. Angel hesitated.
The Vietnamese manager said: "It's cash in hand. And you won't find anything better paid since you don't have a work permit."
"But I do have a work permit," Angel said.
"Then what are you doing here," the Vietnamese woman said. "You have a work permit. You speak English. You can find a better job, yes?"
What the Vietnamese woman didn't know is that if you are in Australia on a Working Holiday Visa (WHV), you do get treated like an illegal immigrant. Before I came to Australia, native friends and relatives affirmed that there was plenty of work, and that it's easy to find temping work. This might be true for Australians, but if you are on a WHV you find most employment avenues closed. You are, in a sense, in a worse situation than the Third World `guest workers' doing the dirty jobs in some parts of the Middle East - the only work available is the kind of work Australians shirk away from.
This was the experience of many of the 85,200 backpackers between the ages of 18 and 30 who entered Australia on a one-year WHV in 2002. The number of Working Holiday Makers (WHM) swelled by increments of about 5,000 yearly throughout the nineties, and the scheme has proven so beneficial for Australia's tourist industry - WHM contribute AU$1.3 billion annually to the Australian economy - that in the late nineties the upper age of eligibility was extended from 26 to 30. Over half of WHM originate from the British Isles - in 2002, 40,946 from the UK and 10,799 from Ireland.
For Angel, it was that week working in the kebab joint that ended her misery. The salary was half the minimum wage, and a pittance, and she decided then that it was time to leave the country. She had originally intended to stay the whole year; now she was leaving after four months. She told me: "Before I came I assumed that I could arrive in Australia with nothing and make money quickly. I'm so glad now I had some savings left-over after my journey through Asia. Now the money's run out, so I am going home. If I really liked the country, maybe I would work at the kebab place under depressing conditions, but all things considered I see no point in subjecting myself to that work at that wage. My advice to others it to be clear about what they can achieve from the experience and not expect as I did, which was to work for three months, save money, travel for three months, and on and on. It doesn't work out like that. You are at the bottom of the heap in the job market, and if you get work it is just enough to live on, which is why most travellers get stuck for a whole year in Sydney on the treadmill of survival, and don't see much of the country. And it is actually in the country that you see the exciting side of Australia."
When I questioned DIMIA (Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs) about this state of affairs, they pointed out that the programme is for WHM "to supplement [their emphasis] their funds through incidental employment." But this is less clear on DIMIA's promotion - the implication is that you can easily earn money to travel around the country. Yet for most travellers the hype that DIMIA churn out about cultural enrichment and the romance of travel takes a beating as soon as they discover that, whether deliberately or otherwise, the WHM scheme is a way to beat illegal immigrants at their own game: who needs to employ illegal immigrants when you have an army of broke Western travellers forced by circumstances to accept the worst jobs at the worst pay? At the crux of the problem is the three-month limitation that WHM can work for a given employer. It reinforces the attitude that WHM are a fickle or dispensable workforce.
Another British traveller, Emma Ashman, 31, recounted: "Aussie employers are explicitly anti-WHV. Many advertisements in the papers clearly state 'no travellers' and I was rejected face to face for the same reason. It seems that employers have had enough of training up employers who then resign with the purpose of travelling around Australia. They also have enough local labour not to need to employ foreign staff and so, unless you are in nursing or hairdressing or construction, gaining employment in Sydney is extremely difficult. I eventually achieved employment in a bar on the strength that I was 'good looking enough'. The company treated their employees very poorly, making them pay for any spillage or mistakes out of paltry wages (especially in my case as the 'travellers tax' of 29% on $13 an hour leaves you with next to nothing). Having promised me lots of shifts, I actually only received three shifts weekly, and I quit after a month because I wasn't earning enough to get by and I had decided to travel up the east coast anyway. Thus perpetuating the reputation [of fickleness] of travellers."
DIMIA defended the three-month limitation. In a statement they said that the condition "is critical in ensuring that the focus of the program remains directed at the holiday component and not the work component. Moving beyond the three months limit would change the intent of the program away from incidental work supplementing a holiday and would establish a more permanent work relationship, to the detriment of Australian jobseekers."
If you read between the lines, you begin to see that the government wants to ensure that WHM are treated as second class employees. This is partly because of economic reality - Australia has a high unemployment rate - and partly because of nationalism - in a country where fierce nationalism borders on the racist, the prospect of being on a fair playing field with foreigners is something Australians find outrageously unacceptable. In practical terms it means that Australians get first preference in the job market, and WHM pick the jobs Australians discard. When I visited temporary employment agencies, the reception was politely distant and inscrutable - and none of the ones I wrote to even bothered to reply. In Perth, one owner of a hardware store told me frankly that I would have a struggle finding employment in sales because I had an accent. He said, "Australians don't like to be served by someone who has an accent." Which leaves only menial and downtrodden work for WHM - door to door sales, farm work, bar or restaurant work, and other unskilled work. (And also some areas of professional work where there is chronic shortages of employees, such as nursing and accountancy.)
According to DIMIA, WHM earn on average $12.46 an hour, and they point out that this is above the minimum wage. But only just, and once tax is paid the average wage dips below the minimum wage. Many of the travellers I questioned were melancholic about the kind of deals they got, if any. Someone I met in Perth, for example, was doing some work on a construction site as an unskilled labourer - digging trenches, knocking down walls, lifting stuff, cleaning walls with acid, and so on - and he was paid $75 daily, which was half the amount his Australian colleagues earned, and which was about $15 daily less than the minimum wage. When I asked him why he had accepted such conditions, he said he didn't have a choice - if he made a fuss, he would end up without a job. It was a story that reminded me of what Emma had told me: "Aussie employers treat travellers with little respect. I was shocked and had to stop myself from making comparisons with how I am regarded professionally at home in order to avoid feeling depressed about the situation. Overall, I will not be speaking fondly about Australia."
Given these conditions it may come as a surprise to learn that WHM are governed, and protected, by the same employment laws that apply to Australian citizens. In theory, WHM can seek redress about substandard deals at the Commonwealth Department of Employment and Workplace Relations; in practice, if your stay is short and your address is a hostel dorm, it's hardly worth the hassle fighting for some injustice. And there is also a contradiction: tax for WHM is at a fixed rate of twenty-nine percent on all earnings, irrespective of earnings. The threshold of tax exemption that applies to Australians doesn't apply to WHM; indeed, most WHM don't make enough to pay tax under Australian tax rules, but they are taxed at the high rate of twenty-nine percent anyway. When I questioned DIMIA about this, and pointed out that this seems an arbitrary contradiction, they answered obliquely and vaguely. They said that the Joint Standing Committee on Migration which was set up to review the WHM scheme recommended that the "base rate of tax payable be retained at the non-resident rate of twenty-nine percent."
Emma did eventually find a stint of well-paid teaching work, but this also proved to be an area of disillusionment. As a fully-qualified arts teacher in London, she applied for a Teachers' Approval Number when she arrived in Australia, and was told that it would take up to six weeks for approval to be granted. "Eventually," she said, "it took four months for approval to come through. When I harassed the Department of Education I was told that January was a busy time as Aussie graduates from the previous academic year were also filing their applications. I found this completely unsatisfactory. If it's busy, employ more people!! Once my number had come through, only one of the teaching agencies that I had signed up with managed to find me work. The school that they sent me to needed me for a term, and this was pure luck - a fluke - as other agency teachers I came into contact with said that work was slow unless you were Maths or Science trained. I was paid $200 dollars per day (before the 29% tax)."
A look at the statistics underlies the widespread disappointment of the WHM scheme. Half of all WHM don't stay the whole year - many of them leave when they run out of credit. When I spoke to Emma she was, after six months, on her way out. She said: "I now plan to continue my travels around Australia for another few months, but this has more to do with the fact that, since I don't want to return to this country, I don't want to have any regrets about missing out on things. Most of this will go on credit as I have not earned enough Aussie dollars to travel around. My advice to others would be, 'Save a lot of pounds and don't plan on earning money in Australia to support your travels as it just isn't happening at the moment.'"
© Victor Paul Borg
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