Labor’s PALM scheme is modern slavery
The Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme between Australia and nine participating Pacific island nations is supposedly mutually beneficial. Australian industry fills labour gaps by bringing in Pacific islanders on temporary working visas. Struggling Pacific economies get a boost from the money workers send home. The only catch is that tens of thousands of temporary visa workers are denied basic labour rights, and that it is Australian bosses who are reaping all the benefits.
The more than 30,000 PALM workers currently in Australia are assigned to specific employers, primarily in rural and regional areas. Seventy percent work in the meat industry. Taufa, a PALM participant in an abattoir freezer room, described his working life to researchers from RMIT: “Each day is a race against time to meet our quotas ... if the order says packing/palletising for 500, we need to complete that 500 by day’s end. It’s a tough job ... we lift entire boxes onto pallets, sometimes stacking the equivalent of three or four cows on a single pallet. Despite the cold, you end up feeling the heat, sweating through the workload”.
Few would undertake this sort of work if they had other options. The PALM scheme trades on poverty to find people who have no choice but to endure it. PALM workers who arrive in Australia and find that they hate the work, or the employer isn’t paying the expected wages, are not allowed to quit. Instead, they need permission from their boss or the government department that oversees the scheme to find another job.
Bosses also often control where PALM workers live, especially in remote areas. Rent can be deducted from workers’ wages for often substandard and overcrowded accommodation provided by employers, with paternalistic rules banning alcohol and drugs.
A May report from the Development Policy Centre exposed that women workers in the PALM scheme are required to undergo pregnancy tests before departing their home country and have resorted to covert abortions while working in Australia. They fear deportation for getting pregnant. In Wagga Wagga, a women’s health clinic estimates that a quarter of women seeking abortions are migrant workers, many on the PALM scheme. Trudi Beck, who runs the clinic, told the ABC on 2 June, “While I support a woman’s right to choose, I have a moral issue with visa structures that mean a woman has to choose between a pregnancy and supporting her family at home”.
The extreme control bosses hold over PALM workers has drawn rightful comparisons to slavery. No wonder more than 7,000 PALM workers have run away from the job over the last five years, ending up “undocumented” and even more vulnerable.
These conditions are no secret. The PALM scheme has had numerous iterations stretching back to 2008, and each one has been criticised for enabling rampant exploitation. Farms and abattoirs have repeatedly been the subject of exposés revealing abhorrent working conditions for mostly migrant workers.
As the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union pointed out in their February submission to the NSW inquiry into modern slavery, “The attraction to employers of a system of temporary visas for unskilled or semi-skilled foreign workers is precisely because such schemes produce the opportunity to exploit workers and circumvent labour standards”.
Australian bosses make money from underpaying migrant workers and skimping on entitlements citizens would expect. RMIT researchers found that PALM workers comprise almost a quarter of Australia’s meat industry, which had a turnover in the 2021-2022 financial year of $75.4 billion.
The Australia Institute estimated in 2024 that PALM workers spend close to $1 billion per year on living expenses and taxes, compared to sending home only around $468 million. As the report says, “In other words, Australia benefits twice as much from the scheme as the Pacific countries providing it with cheap labour”.
Successive Australian governments have had a particular interest in temporary worker schemes targeting the Pacific islands. These economic arrangements are part of Australia leveraging influence in what it sees as its backyard. The Pacific islands rely on foreign aid more than any other region on earth, and Australia is its largest donor. Pacific island governments, then, sometimes willingly, sometimes begrudgingly, acquiesce to Australian demands.
Under Albanese, the PALM scheme has been expanded into aged care and child care, sectors populated by notoriously abusive employers. Instead of heeding recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aged Care to improve working conditions and end privatisation, Labor has chosen to add slave labour to the noxious mix.
In 2024, Albanese mandated that PALM workers must be paid at least 30 hours per week and has piloted allowing 200 workers to bring family to Australia and access Medicare. But PALM workers remain bonded to a particular employer and are denied full access to government entitlements. Bosses will continue to exploit this vulnerability.
Even less useful has been Labor’s 2024 appointment of the country's first ever anti-slavery commissioner, a political response to media revelations and outrage regarding migrant working conditions. The commissioner’s website explains that “The Commissioner cannot investigate, or resolve, complaints concerning instances or suspected instances of modern slavery”. The commissioner can, however, “make observations regarding systemic issues based on his engagement with victims and survivors and the broader community”. The anti-slavery commissioner’s office has not issued a single press statement about the PALM scheme, despite complaints about the scheme being an important catalyst for the NSW modern slavery inquiry.
Labor is helping bosses treat Pacific workers like slaves.
