°Student+Migrant+Worker
The remarks below about the connections between student visas and work in Australia were written by Liz. I moved them from the comments under the post about the taxidrivers’ strike in Melbourne so as to prompt further discussion. - a.
So - if you look at Australia, obviously there has always been the use of low-wage migrant labour, and worse, slave labour for indig crew and Pacific Islanders.
However, I would suggest that the transformations in the Australian economy since trade liberalisation in the 1980s (1989 - Professor Ross Garnaut - Australia and the north east asian ascendancy - the policy document that Rudd’s new climate guru wrote convincing Hawke to move to tariff reductions - in textiles this actually predated tariff reductions in the rest of the West), as well as the nationalist counter-reaction from the trade and student unions, have created new and more direct manifestations of the attempt to drive the wage floor down by deliberately tweaking migration schemes towards the creation of low wage and precarious labour markets. As Ange has said many times, it is possible to trace the intersections between the internment camps and the labour market. I’m going to try to do this with a little bit on student visas too… actually, most of this is going to be about student visas, but with other stuff thrown in as poorly organised thoughts.
As an example: a mate of mine whose mum has done various forms of outwork. she is cambodian but told the various refugee and UN agencies in the laste 80s that she was Vietnamese, cos despite the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, it was years before Cambodians were considered at risk. Anyway, she has been afraid of government authorities ever since, and shies away from various forms of government assistance because she fears the authorities finding her out – she is strategic and careful about social services and information sharing. Because of course, despite what many in the “refugee movement” seem to remember Port Hedland was the first of the refugee detention camps, and it began incarcerating Cambodians in 1992 under Keating. She and many other thousands of “Vietnamese” women work as outworkers, both because is is easier work for refugee women with poor English languages skills and child care responsibilities to get, but also because their arrival in the late 80s and 90s coincided fortuitously with the mass closure of the textile factories because of the Labor governments decision to massively reduce tariffs. While remaining companies, particularly in womens fashion still required local production, outwork flourished, and it is now the predominant form of work in the clothing industry in Australia. Despite the Textile union finally changing its tune to a more progressive one (they used to openly criticize outworkers as scabs), in 1996 running an outwork information campaign to try to organise outworkers, many of these women are suss on unions partly cos of their experience in Red Khmer or Red Vietnam but mostly because the union’s demands simply don’t suit their lives. They do not want to be factory workers and they don’t need visibility because many of them survive by working shit hours for crap pay but also rightly scamming centrelink. It is only recently that the union has started to realise this, yet still for reasons of financial survival as well as overt hostility to conceding the existence of informal work as a choice people might actively make, they continue to focus their organising on their better paid factory work force - they pay union dues, and are easier to organise in factories.
Fast forward to the adoption of Hanson’s Temporary Protection Visa regime by Howard in 1999. When many of these guys (and most of them were men, though some came with their families) started to be released from the camps, they had no option but to go into really badly paid work in factories, abbatoirs and fruit picking, because they were not worth training in “real jobs” if they could be booted out in 30 months – which is how long a TPV lasts. Though it can last much longer of course. Besides which many of the Hazara Afghani gents who were among the first to get out often had no formal schooling or qualifications. Even the middle class Iraqis and Iranians couldn’t get many of their qualifications recognized. All over the country then you find guys still on TPVs working these jobs - and as if to undercut the well-honed survival strategy of the Vietnamese outworker, the TPV holder can only access “special benefit”, not normal benefits, if they are out of work. Special benefit is a discretionary category of centrelink in some sense – presented as a gift from Centrelink to those who are not eligible for anything else but who are otherwise going to be homeless or otherwise destitute. It pays less than the dole. And of course some people who are incarcerated in the camps, often after being picked up in the community, may be released with a “no work, no study” clause on their temporary visa as well as being denied access to any other assistance.
Roll on to the introduction of the 20 hour work restriction for international students - I frustratingly can’t put my finger on the start date. So the 20 hour work restriction goes for all international students during course time. So, you can only do shitty low-paid casual jobs, either because no one else will hire you even if you want to work within the 20 hours (Mcdonalds shifts, for example, are organized usually on a 7 hours roster – so you can only get two shifts cos 3 will put you over the 20 hour limit – many students go into cleaning, where they can do at least 15 or 16 hours without pressure to do more) or because you need to work in jobs where they will turn a blind eye to visa breaches, as a way of keeping the workforce compliant: the cab industry in particular but also hotels and clubs, in security etc.
It should be noted that unlike most other categories of visa breach, a breach of the international student work rights regime is not able to be subject to review. Cancellation is final. Interestingly, in August 07, more explicit criminal sanctions came into force against employers who hire illegal workers. (See this)
On the more explicit role of the universities: Central Queensland University, whose Melbourne campus is exclusively international students, is privately owned and recruits almost exclusively from India and China – assessment level 3 countries, lower middle class kids doing desperate stuff to survive (often stuffed 6 or 7 to a room in 2 bedroom inner city apartments, sometimes with contracts for rent that go for 12 month blocks even though kids try to go home for the 3 month break, and are sometimes paid off by doing the cleaning in the building. This is why you will find many international students sleeping in the 24 hour computer labs at RMIT city campus – only quiet place to study, or they are essentially sleeping in shifts). A bunch of CQU students went on strike after they failed en masse an accounting exam in March 2006. (See here)
When I went down to hang out with the strikers, vast majority Punjabi students, I noticed that the electronic bulletin board in the main entrance to the office block that is the Central Queensland University Melbourne campus was explicitly advertising “13 CABS” information sessions for students, held on campus. 13 CABS or black cabs operates more south east side, with easily a larger proportion of Punjabi drivers than Silver Top (many at silver top are African/Arabic).
Almost every night cab driver over the weekend, late night 7/11 worker, and increasingly call centre worker (heaps, including part-time cabbies, work at UCMS at cnr William/Flinders in the city, taking abusive phone calls from Telstra customers who think they are yelling at someone in Bangalore) that you will meet is a masters of accounting or engineering or computer science student, from India. Doing this stuff alongside study, they often can’t manage to get the experience they need in order to then achieve permanent residency within the 6 months after completion of their degree (though you can apply for a visa in which you have to clock up 1000 hours of work in 18 months in your field, otherwise you need to try to get PR within 6 months of course completion on the basis of points allocated for things like getting a job in your field of study, or having to live in rural areas for a measly extra 5 points (at least it was a few years ago – and Adelaide was considered rural!). And many places like big banks specifically rule out job applications from any non-citizens unless they are already permanent resident. So when you count the period of study, plus the extra visa you can get for 18 months if your occupation/course of study is considered in demand, you can get 3-6 years worth of appallingly low-paid “guest” work out of the international student population. And with the absolute necessity of breaching your 20 hour work restriction in order to survive, employers have got you by the short and curlies. And of course students are often explicitly recruited into courses like business courses at RMIT where they promise you a year of work experience – only to inform you when you get there that you have to find the work yourself, and if you don’t (which is the case for the vast majority of internationals) you can do a “professional skills program” that will not in any way count towards residency the way that work experience will.
And then, only then, the 457 visa, which came to prominence a few years ago - as if the unions have only just now noticed that their overt support for stricter border controls to protect the Aussie worker has really fucked up rather badly. the claim of skills shortages used to bring in lower paid overseas workers who have often ended up instead filling unskilled labor vacancies and sometimes ended up dead. The AMWU has actually been recruiting these workers which is better than most unions. And of course, now the plan for the Pacific worker guest visa, getting vocal support from the AWU and various Pacific Island NGO experts and even from some of the more progressive sex worker organisations, the skilled sex worker visa.
But the beauty of the student visa of course lies in a number of things: the general leftist stance on international students is that they are not for us to concern ourselves with because
a) from the “student movement”: they are all rich kids who can easily afford the fees, and are buying their way into “our” uni places
b) from “left-wing staff”: they are rich kids buying up the places that belong by rights to the working class aussie kids AND they are the naughty plagiarists who are driving down standards and bullying us to pass them
c) from the anarchists and the socialists: they are just aspirational middle class kids (which is okay for whitey, but not for anyone else) who are just making their way up the corporate ladder anyway and will be finished in their shit jobs in a few years – then they will be our enemy!
d) from the trade unions: they don’t join our unions, and they all work outside their visa rights, thereby taking jobs that should go to the yoof of Australia
So the exploitation of international students in the workplace is really the perfect crime: because no one whose job it is, theoretically, to give a shit about it, does. The international student visa 20 hour work restriction has and will, I reckon, have a much greater impact on the creation of bargain basement wage levels than the 457 visa. And of course when the Punjabis go on revolting, no one will be more surprised, and hopefully less prepared to squash it, than the trade union movement.
Liz
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I was alerted to this situation by one of my academic friends a couple years back. She was appalled at what constituted the ’student experience’ for a large minority of her students.
I don’t agree that academics necessarily take the attitude outlined here, but they aren’t exactly doing anything about it either. It is more common to encounter a kind of recognition that it’s ‘not the students’ fault’ and a complacent blaming of the greedy university without any action.
Klaus K [May 4, 2008 @ 11:48 pm]
Thanks for this post, which traces in a concrete and important way the link between various Australian visa classes and the precarisation of labour experiences and markets. I think it is also important to analyse these developments in relation to the notion of skills shortage, which now becomes the dominant trope for policy making: education revolution, just in time migration, etc. The racialised presence of subjects who perform both ’skilled’ (engineer, student) and ‘unskilled’ tasks (taxi driver, shop assistant) not only scrambles traditional labour market hierarchies and binaries. It also suggests that more is at stake the construction of the concept and ‘policy lever’ of skills shortage than the usual invocations of growth through innovation, etc. Not by accident has the ‘Agenda for Work’ of the new Australian government involved the collapse of employment, education and social inclusion under one portfolio.
It is also necessary to think about how the path from student visa to permanent residency to citizenship (often acquired only as a base for further international labour mobility) supplies a juridical frame that has provided a funding stream for the Australian higher education sector during the era of its neoliberalisation. There is a link between the transversal cutting of the student-worker relation in the Melbourne taxi driver situation and the precarisation of work (particularly undergraduate teaching) in the university. It might be worth considering how these tendencies might be interrupted or amplified by current developments in global higher education (zoning technologies and ‘education cities’) being discussed in posts like this: http://globalhighered.wordpress.com/2008/04/16/metaphors/.
In his 2007 book Global Body Shopping, Xiang Biao conducts a multi-site ethnography of the Indian labour regime for the transnational labour mobility of IT workers in three sites: Sydney, Kuala Lumpar, and the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. One of his most interesting findings concerns the funding for the entry of young men into this transnational labour system at the Indian end. It turns out that the high entry fees paid to labour/migration agencies, etc. is usually obtained through the Indian dowry system. Money is passed from family to family with the marriage of the daughter. So the labour conditions of software engineers in Sydney (sponsored for the 457 visa by ‘body shops’ who then farm them out as flexible project labour) is directly linked to the unpaid or underpaid work of women in Andhra Pradesh. An adequate analysis of the plight of the Melbourne taxi drivers should probably also consider how their mobility to Australia is funded at the Punjab end.
Brett [May 4, 2008 @ 11:52 pm]
Thanks for your suggestions about further inquiry, Brett.
In regards to students, as opposed to 457 visas, I don’t really know much more about how the funds come together except for a few things about the recruitment and visa financial requirements process. In terms of recruitment, obviously this occurs through the thousands of education agents that make usually verbal, but often written promises, about what students are to expect once they get here – mostly lies. The legislation governing education agents, many of whom are hired directly through the university-owned IDP, was theoretically tightened up just around the time of the CQU hunger strike (changes to the ESOS ACT in 2006). CQU however, was never prosecuted for a clear breach of the regime which involved offering incentives to students (ranging for cash prizes, to laptops, to holidays) to recruit their family members to the university.
The amount of documentation, and the amount of money in your bank account that you need to demonstrate to be granted a visa is determined by your assessment level. US, Swedish and Argentinian students, at assessment level 1 for example, need to only make vague promises about being able to pay for their first year. By the time you get further down on the assessment levels (level 3 for India, 4 for China, 4 for Bangladesh), you need to be able to demonstrate capacity to pay a greater proportion of your degree.
See here for the difference in amount of money you need to demonstrate that you can access for a higher ed student visa:
http://www.immi.gov.au/students/students/573-1/financial.htm
http://www.immi.gov.au/students/students/573-2/financial.htm
http://www.immi.gov.au/students/students/573-3/financial.htm
http://www.immi.gov.au/students/students/573-4/financial.htm
Also, I think it was about 6 years ago that DIMIA (before it became DIMA, then DIC, then DIAC) issued some kind of instruction limiting the choice of banks that Indian students could hold their savings in for the purposes of demonstrating compliance with DIMIA financial requirements because of some kind of vague allegation of fraud.
Most of the students I have ever spoken to about how they got here, both men and women, will tell you that there is lots of creative accounting that goes on, and double and triple mortgages that there families take out. But I have never really pursued it that seriously. In relation to the Chinese students, I also came across a strange and scary scheme whereby a young TAFE student was brought in through the RMIT TAFE bridging program at WUST (in Wuhan) in China, then into the second year of an RMIT accounting degree, all paid for by a Chinese accounting firm. her degree was paid for by the company, who she was then expected to pay off by working for them on completion of the degree, back in China. Her visa was revoked and she was terrified of being sent back home cos she wasn’t quite sure how she was going to pay back more than $60,000 worth of uni fees to this company without a degree. When I last ran into her she was training to become a pastry chef….I think you’re right that we should find out more about exactly how the financing is happening. I’ve been trying to trace what connections there are between the labour-dispatch system in China and the international students recruitment regime, but haven’t come up with much yet…
Thanks for the link too. RMIT for example, is already involved in a whole number of joint venture type projects offshore.
http://www.rmit.edu.au/browse;ID=ti7ncp935w3az
Whilst its Vietnam campus is wholly RMIT owned, places like WUST and SIFT seem to run similar schemes with other unis. WUST and SIFT tend to feed TAFE students ill-prepared into the second year of an RMIT business degree in Australia, whereas HKMA runs Bachelor and Masters programs in their own right.
As for the opinions of staff: I have to say, my experience is that hostility to Indian and Chinese students in particular is often palpable. And the NTEU in its most left-wing incarnations would vent this hostility to international students as anti-plagiarism campaigns – backed in many instances by NUS. I don’t know where to find it, but when one such “scandal” broke somewhere in NSW, the president of NUS in 2004 (Jodie someone?) issued a press release arguing that plagiarism was the logical conclusion of letting international students buy up our uni places. Whilst many staff are sympathetic, they are also very committed to their own academic border control regimes, and in particular, throw their weight behind the racialised hysteria of anti-plagirism campaigns at every opportunity. It seems for many the last area where they can exercise “control” and enforce “standards” and seems a particular bugbear for even the most lefty staff. They will happily force students to submit to anti-plagiarism software like “turnitin”, precisely because they perceive that it is the only way to keep an eye on standards, or control of their workload in the context of casualisation, increasing use of sessionals, constant budget cuts.
Liz [May 5, 2008 @ 1:04 am]
i will read this later, but just thought you might like to know that many of the drivers i spoke to were very interested in the ideas of workers centers that have sprung up in the usa… uni’s or other spaces could be the spaces…
dr.woooo [May 5, 2008 @ 2:12 am]
I don’t dispute that some of the energy behind anti-plagiarism is coming from those places, certainly, but I tend to see it as a real problem, a problem that has little to do with international students as a category and a lot to do with the conditions under which most students are operating - ie fairly long hours of paid work alongside studying. The reasons for this differ according to context.
Those instances of plagiarism of the cut-and-paste variety that I have identified were largely undertaken by middle class white Australian students who either had to, or were expected to, work 20+ hours a week while doing their BAs, partly, I think, because their degrees aren’t taken seriously even by themselves.
My feeling on the matter is that tertiary education can be interpreted in a rights and responsibilities framework: without the right to space and time for reading and critical reflection, then the idea that students take responsibility for producing ‘original’ work cannot be sustained. On the other hand, one component of assessment is ‘originality’ of expression, and correct citation of sources, so I can’t avoid the plagiarism procedures when I’m aware of an infringement. I don’t think anti-plagiarism is a legitimate campaign in isolation students rights.
Klaus K [May 5, 2008 @ 11:35 am]
‘from’
Klaus K [May 5, 2008 @ 11:36 am]
Hi Klaus
I suppose i don’t want to follow this tangent so much. But whilst your individual experience suggests otherwise, I think you’ll find that the way that universities and higher education media run their campaigns against plagiarism is explicitly racialised - the problem is always identifed as being a problem of international students
The Kevin Wong case is here.
and the UNE case a few years later here.
As for the workers center idea - there is some stuff that I have been reading from Canada about informal workers centres - organising centres providing legal support etc. The idea of such things at uni campuses has been tried - I think it failed largely because it failed to recognise that actually whitey spends lots less time on campus than international students and was definitely more pitched at locals. But maybe it could be worth pursuing. Of course many of the campuses that cabbies are from are little private colleges like CQU or places like Brighton International College or 10 or more others right in the CBD that you won’t notice unless you’re looking for them, or even places like RMIT Business campus, which has no open gathering spaces. But other spaces can always be found…
Liz [May 5, 2008 @ 2:10 pm]
“I think you’ll find that the way that universities and higher education media run their campaigns against plagiarism is explicitly racialised”
Fair enough, though I might want to dispute the conflation of universities with higher education media. I think the various interests can be teased apart a little more thoroughly, and there may be leverage for action in those distinctions.
I guess my original point was that even ‘critical’ academics, when they are aware of and deliberately attempt to counter this racialisation, just end up complacently resenting the university but at no point really disputing what they are being told to do in its name. Anyway, tangent dropped if you’d prefer.
Klaus K [May 5, 2008 @ 2:40 pm]
A few things I wanted to highlight from this discussion so far, or those things I find interesting, and difficult.
How to think beyond notions of rights (and the politics of recognition, merit, visibility which attach to this) by focusing on what actually occurs in the process of struggles, what is effective.
I won’t rehearse the arguments about rights and recognition here, again. But I will say that there is an interesting tension between the circumstance in which one is subjected to humiliation, bashings or worse that inclines one to think that rights might provide some guarantee of protection from such and the fleeting refusal of recognition that provided the critical moment of power and leverage during the taxidrivers’ strike.
To put that another way: it was in that moment when they refused to trade the blockade in for a meeting of representatives with the Minister that matters were forced open. How to make this notion of material effectiveness the principle of organisation and strategy rather than engage procedures of recogntion as if this is the goal or solution?
Because, among other things, I do have a strong feeling that much of the talk about “improving the image and training” of taxidrivers - as a low-level articulation of recognition - may well become the means by which credentialisation formalises some more stringent, if apparently technical, version of segregation.
The other thing I find interesting is the way in which the War on Plagiarism is both a distraction, and a trap, precisely because it forms the seemingly indisputable tip of a whole bundle of propositions about rights, labour, merit, property and propriety. I actually don’t think it’s possible to separate these things out from their racialised or gendered aspects, and the conditions under which both of these distribute and rationalise exploitation.
I do think Liz is right about how the War on Plagiarism has unfolded. It’s been fascinating, and a little surprising for me, to come across people who have been sincerely committed to closing the internment camps simultaneously express those resentment about international students whom they’ve taught. My sense, here, is that the latter appear to violate that (liberal) ‘anti-racist’ racist rule (of which there is a more gendered version too) about not being sufficiently victimised, too uppity, as it were.
Anyway, even though I don’t want to reiterate a whole lot of previous writings, I was still trying to think of a pithy way of connecting up the arguments about human rights here with those more recently about net-work here.
I deliberately riffed a line of Marx’s in the human rights essay, never attributed, from the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “With our shepherds to the fore, we only once kept company with freedom, on the day of its interment.”
And all I can wonder about is when is reprisal no longer considered as proper? Or, to rethink it on the ground of the whole question of colonisation, the extraction of labour, exploitation and, indeed, what is not even considered to be worthy of being called labour, barely ’skilled’ or unwaged or simply the actions of machines/non-human/animals - when does one allow oneself to forget that what is often deemed to be proper is also that which has been been considered (legislated and habituated) to have been rightfully appropriated?
s0metim3s [May 6, 2008 @ 1:51 am]
“My sense, here, is that the latter appear to violate that (liberal) ‘anti-racist’ racist rule (of which there is a more gendered version too) about not being sufficiently victimised, too uppity, as it were.”
This is a very good point. And it’s occurring at the intersection of points b) and c) that Liz made in the initial post, I think., amongst those academics who see themselves as ‘critical’ or active.
Klaus K [May 6, 2008 @ 4:04 am]
Thanks Klaus - I see what you mean. I didn’t want to curtail discussion. And I think the way that that the War on Plagiarism discussion has now gone is much less tangential to this discussion.
Ange
I think that you’re right about the credentialism problem. One of the very first things that was said to me by drivers in 2006 after the murder of Rajneesh Joga was they feared the TWU because they knew that any trade offs over safety would come in the form of racialised crack downs in regards to paperwork or lack thereof: whether that be visa restrictions, training and certificates, etc. They could see exactly how the students working over their 20 hours would be sacrificed in those negotiations, rounded up and deported, and it is why many of them resisted the overtures from other older Anglo drivers (well-meaning mind you) to seek a formal award process with sets of hours. etc They could see, like outworkers know now, the trap inherent in the regulation.
And I think what you have said here is so correct.
“But I will say that there is an interesting tension between the circumstance in which one is subjected to humiliation, bashings or worse that inclines one to think that rights might provide some guarantee of protection from such and the fleeting refusal of recognition that provided the critical moment of power and leverage during the taxidrivers’ strike”
People might think it a bit dramatic when I say this, but the cries for “human rights”, “we are human” and signs talking about how their parents didn’t send them here to die reminded me horribly of the kind of things people would scream to us from behind the razor wire in the desert camps. I think that pull of rights is so strong because they feel how much they are hated, by tabloid media, by passengers, etc. But I think that lessons about material effectiveness are coming too. The rumour going around is the Kosky is going to back away from the mandatory provision about safety screens, and instead insist that drivers must request it. Drivers are saying already that this is a guarantee of losing work. If Kosky goes ahead with the backflip, I think it might be soon that they are back on the streets….
liz [May 6, 2008 @ 5:01 am]
Hi everyone,
I’m wondering if i could have permission from people to reprint parts of this discussion (and post) in a zine that we’re doing at melbourne uni?
- Max
Max [May 6, 2008 @ 5:40 am]
Max, fine by me. Others, I assume, will speak up if yes or no, or I can swap relevant email addresses offblog if asked.
s0metim3s [May 6, 2008 @ 11:34 am]
there was a surprisingly good article on indian students and exploitation in the rental market. $85 a head and living 4 to a room ( 15 to a house ) and details of level of racism and other work conditions in - shock horror - the herald sun on either saturday or fridays paper. i tried to find it… but no luck. if anyone comes across it or knows of similiar ( apparently the indian press released a report to an aus-indian paper late last week. )
ta
dr.woooo @ gmail.com
dr.woooo [May 12, 2008 @ 4:45 am]
Hey all,
here is the submission that the NLC (international student department of NUS) put in to the Residential Accommodation Issues Paper prepared by Consumer Affairs Victoria. has some useful stuff
http://www.nlc.edu.au/research%20files/nlc_cav_housingpaper.pdf
liz [May 13, 2008 @ 4:27 am]
!?
dr.woooo [May 18, 2008 @ 3:26 am]
i’m following this discussion with interest, particularly when i came across this announcement from Senator chris evans last friday concerning the budgeting for a 3.8% increase in minimum wage for those on 457 visas. in his media release he has this to say - ‘The increase is part of a package of reforms outlined in the Budget designed to improve the integrity of the temporary skilled migration (457 visa) program.’
http://www.minister.immi.gov.au/media/media-releases/2008/ce08050.htm
Obviously the politics involved here are complicated within issues of identity and migration, students who are workers, workers who have been attracted to australia by the promise of … What? to find that what Temporary Business (Long Stay) actually means is performing menial unskilled labour? And judging from whats already been said, this is where we come to the idea of precarious low wage labour markets - which, under this line of analysis could be characterised as an invisible yet very real labouring class which fuels the privilege of whitey ‘working families’ by their very invisibility (which of course provides moral stability as the exploitation is hidden and easily refutable or diminished with the reliable tools of racism) and their precariousness.
which leaves me unable to decide how to take this comment from senator evans, also in the media release
‘’The 457 visa scheme is important for the continued economic growth of Australia and we must ensure that the community supports the program,’ Senator Evans said.
‘We need to protect migrant workers from exploitation and ensure the wages and conditions of Australian workers are not undercut.’
Now a language analysis of this phrase (which runs in that order) might suggest that what evans is actually saying is more like ‘we need to keep exploiting these people y offering them something that they can’t have (liberty, the australian dream, acceptance), and we need you to be okay with it to faithful white constituents, so here’s what we’re going to do. we give the migrants a minimum pay rise to keep them happy, to ensure that all the rest of you don’t have your capacity to work for the system adversely affected should you realise how you are essentially supported by a brown underclass. Done? Done! I love my job!’
Or am i being a bit cycnical?
That rant aside, i’m very much interested in learning more about the 457 program of migration, which i understand involves EMPLOYERS bringing people to aus. and sponsoring their visa process. Is this accompanied by a process of recruitment from likey labour markets? maybe akin to how aus. students are constantly being told that they can travel anywhere in the world and teach english, simply because they speak it? seems like a strangely apt comparison in terms of skilled and unskilled labour.
enough.
that is all.
M. Skelton [May 29, 2008 @ 7:30 am]
Very quickly Mickey - The 457 seems, to me, like a form of bonded labour.
On the “offering them something that they can’t have” and the question of visibility, if you’ve not come across it already, you might find Lauren Berlant’s essay interesting. Can download it from here.
This never-attainable quest for visibility/recognition might incline toward a more intense attachment to normativity. Aside from the whole series of problems which Liz and I have been discussing about visibility in the comments above. See also here on precariousness and visibility, or on Woomera2002 or on class and recognition [a pdf].
s0metim3s [May 29, 2008 @ 1:04 pm]
People might be interested in this-
http://www.theage.com.au/national/foreign-students-being-exploited-20080611-2p5c.html
and the report here- www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/people/staff_pages/Marginson/IntStuFinancesFeb2008.pdf
and summary here- www.education.monash.edu.au/centres/mcrie/docs/202interviewsupdated060605.pdf
max [June 12, 2008 @ 10:59 am]
Thanks Max.
s0metim3s [June 14, 2008 @ 10:16 am]
brief update:
I spoke with a driver today who was very involved in the demos. He reckons at least 10 of his friends lost their jobs as a result of their involvement in the strike. There is supposed to be a mass meeting this Thursday at the Flemington racecourse at 12pm on Thursday - but we’re not sure cos it has been postponed 3 times already. And of course, the gov has backed off mandatory safety screens.
The Indus Age, a local south asian paper, ran a whole edition on the cabbies ( I had an article in there, along with some stuff on legal rights for non-citizens) in its June edition - at the moment, this is proving a surprisingly useful forum for the cabbies…
Liz [June 16, 2008 @ 2:23 pm]
That’s not a surprising set of outcomes, for the moment at least, but still shit. I went looking for the articles online but couldn’t find them. If you want, and they’re not online, I can always reproduce them here.
And thanks Liz, as always.
s0metim3s [June 16, 2008 @ 2:42 pm]
AN INTERNATIONAL student who was paid just $1.26 an hour for more than 150 hours work as a security guard at the Australian Open tennis is suing several companies for being treated like a “slave”.
Pakistani student Faisal Durrani, 23, who wants to become a permanent resident, said he was aware of at least another four security guards from the subcontinent who had only received a small payment for their work at the Open.
http://www.theage.com.au/national/student-sues-for-slavery-200-for-158-hours-security-work-20080706-32np.html
Not sure whether this went through the union - the fact that it is Maurice Blackburn makes it possible, as does the fact that the LHMU has an international student as an organiser in cleaning. But the reality of how little unions give a shit about this makes it unlikely…
Liz [July 7, 2008 @ 9:22 am]