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The horticulture industry is a deep stain on modern Australia. No other industry combines systematic exploitation of its workers, routine abuse and harassment, and inflicting misery on young visitors and migrants with such extensive political power and a sympathetic media.

No matter how many Harvest Trail inquiries by the Fair Work Ombudsman reveal that most farmers underpay fruit pickers, no matter how many Fair Work Commission judgments expose the scale of award non-compliance within the industry, no matter how many reports of sexual harassment and rape of backpackers make their way into courts, the National Party will always help the industry to access cheap labour, and the media will always run variations of “Australians don’t want to work”/”fruit will rot on trees” stories.

One factor that helps protect horticulture from the opprobrium the conduct of so many farmers should bring on it is the opacity with which it operates. Establishing the truth of claims made about conduct is immensely difficult.

That’s partly because so many employees within the sector — more than half the workforce — are temporary migrants. That includes actual temporary visa holders, foreign students, backpackers and undocumented migrants or those who have come here — often as part of scams run by labour hire companies — pretending to be tourists, only to claim asylum and claim bridging visas while their appeals creep through the legal system.

Temporary migrants have poor language skills, don’t know about Australia’s system of workers’ protections, and may be here only for short periods before returning to their countries of origin.

That’s why rigorous quantitative evidence of underpayment in the sector is hard to come by. The union case in the Fair Work Commission against the piecework rate relied on academic research that employer groups tried to characterise as “anecdotes and stories”.

But what are the actual drivers of exploitation? One common argument is that the constant pressure on farm workers is driven by the pressure applied by the supermarket duopoly to farmers to screw down prices as tightly as possible. But there are crucial intermediary firms within that supply chain from farm gate to supermarket shelf — large packing companies like Costa Group, a billion-dollar international company — which distribute produce to supermarkets. And they often don’t directly deal with farmers, but with broking agents and marketing firms.

And labour supply firms are a key component of the labour supply chain for the horticulture sector: the Fair Work Ombudsman’s Harvest Trail report showed widespread non-compliance with the law by labour hire firms which ranged from large companies to small operations, often using migrant labour. The FWO in its Harvest Trail inquiry complained that its inspectors struggled to keep track of highly mobile workers they wanted to speak to, and often those workers had little idea which farms they had worked on.

One of the upsides of the role played by Coles and Woolworths, however, is that both are subject to modern slavery laws, which require them to report on their actions to investigate, manage and remediate the risk of modern slavery practices in their supply chains. While wage underpayment is not a form of modern slavery, it is often a good indicator that it is going on within a company or sector. The most recent Coles modern slavery statement contains the results of more than 300 modern slavery supply chain audits, with the horticulture industry the key source of risk for the company in Australia. Costa Group’s modern slavery statement focuses on horticulture and identifies particular risks from labour hire companies and the outsourcing of labour by farmers.

Meanwhile, the government carries on as if the horticulture industry is squeaky clean, working hard to set up an agriculture visa to enable the sector to source cheap labour from South-East Asian countries to replace a declining supply of backpackers from developed countries. The National Party routinely asks as spokesperson for the industry, which wields considerable economic power in Queensland (along with the sugar industry, as David Littleproud has just demonstrated).

But many claims made by the industry fail to stand up to scrutiny. Claims throughout last year and this year that fruit would be left to rot and prices would skyrocket due to a lack of foreign fruit pickers have proved wrong. Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows that the price of fresh fruit has fallen 2% in total since the June 2020 quarter, while vegetable prices are down 0.6%. The only price spike was in the June quarter this year, of about 5%, but prices have fallen more than enough in other quarters to offset that one-off, due to strong growing conditions.

Only a concerted effort to boost transparency in the industry, by empowering and funding industrial regulators to accumulate hard data on supply chains and labour conditions, will permit a serious effort to end the deep shame that the horticulture industry represents. That’s assuming the Coalition will ever stop protecting it.