Ms Bassina Farbenblum1
1UNSW, Sydney, Australia
Recent media exposes have drawn attention to significant underpayment and exploitation of international students in Australia. There has, however, been limited data available on the prevalence and nature of exploitation of Australia’s international student workforce, and still less understanding of why agencies such as the Fair Work Ombudsman rarely receive complaints from international students. Seeking to fill this gap, the 2017 National Temporary Migrant Work Survey collected information from 2,392 international students about their working conditions and views on related issues. This paper presents findings on international students’ pay and features of their lowest paid job, and experiences of more severe exploitative practices. It also addresses students’ knowledge of minimum wage in Australia, and their perceptions of wage rates of other international students. Turning to what, if anything, students did to address their underpayment, the paper sets out the outcomes for the few students who took some form of action. It then explores the fears, concerns and other reasons given by the remaining substantial majority of underpaid students who took no action. We consider how these factors differ between nationalities, types of jobs, and between students at universities and those at English-language and vocational colleges, revealing a complex portrait of widespread exploitation that demands urgent evidence-based interventions.
Biography:
Bassina Farbenblum is a solicitor and Senior Lecturer at UNSW Law where she is the founding director of the UNSW Human Rights Clinic and the cross-institutional Migrant Worker Justice Initiative. Bassina has led national and global empirical research projects on temporary migrants in Australia, the US and Asia and was co-author of the recent landmark report on Wage Theft in Australia. Prior to academia, she worked as a human rights litigator and policy advisor at the Australian Human Rights Commission, the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, the American Civil Liberties Union and other legal services organisations and private law firms in New York, Mumbai, and Sydney. Bassina’s current research focuses on work experiences, accommodation issues and access to redress by international students and other temporary migrants in Australia, as well as migrant worker recruitment and access to remedies in South and South East Asia. She was awarded the global Open Society Foundations International Migration Initiative Fellowship in recognition of her work with government and other organisations in Indonesia in relation to labour migration.