Protest Super Liquor Slavery Sat. 3.30pm Papatoetoe

By Mike Treen, Unite Union National Director

A picket is planned for outside the Super Liquor store in Papatoetoe at 3.30pm this Saturday (today!) to protest against the theft of tens of thousands of dollars in wages from a migrant worker from India.

It seems that some of the liquor shops around Auckland have been using students from India and making them work for only four or five dollars an hour. The students would often work well in excess of the legal 20 hours a week allowed under their visas to try and make ends meet.

The employers in these cases (usually from the same ethnic grouping) would use all sorts of bullying and threats to keep the workers in line. Breaching their visas can be a reason to be sent home so it is difficult for the student-workers to use official channels to complain. Wage and time records are non existent or falsified.

In another liquor store case from a different brand reported to us this week, the employer also has an ownership interest in a private training institution where these students would be attending courses costing tens of thousands of dollars in fees.

It is often the students from poorer backgrounds who are trying to alleviate the burden on their families that get trapped into these situations.

For those from India, their hope is that they can graduate from the course and then get a proper work visa for a few years and, with luck, progress that to permanent residence.

The government suddenly made that a lot harder earlier this year by removing many categories of jobs from those that qualify as being suitable for permanent residence. This included the position of restaurant manager. This was like changing the rules half way through and the students felt terribly betrayed. We have heard case after case of students who had paid thousands of dollars to NZ education providers while working at a fast food company to try and get the training and promotion they needed to eventually get permanent residence. That money, and they several years they invested as well, has now been completely wasted.

Then, to add to the confusion, the government has just announced that they intend to massively expand the number of overseas students in the country. The goal is to double revenue from around $2.5 billion a year to $5 billion by 2025. One way they are doing this is by making it much easier for students to work part time while they study and full-time during any vacation period. Phd students can work as much as they like.

There are over 90,000 overseas students currently in NZ. Around 20% of those who come on student visas have been able to progress to residency.

The total number of temporary work visas issued each year has been around 166,000 a year for the last 6 years.

The fast food industry has come to depend on migrant workers. 40-50 percent of all workers in the industry are on temporary visas – i.e., student visas or fixed term work visas. Management in the industry is overwhelmingly migrant. The companies have used this fact to squeeze wages for managers so that they have declined by 30-50% in real terms over recent decades.

Organising these workers has been a huge challenge. We often get union organisers express some frustration about the perceived docility of Indian workers. One organiser called them “the philosopers” because the standard reply to a five-minute recruitment pitch was a polite “I’ll think about it”, meaning “No”. “I’ll have to consult with my partner/parent/manager” was another polite refusal. But the reality of the fear was whispered – if we join the union, they will cut our hours and not give us the training steps we need to get the promotion necessary to advance along the immigration ladder.” The fact that people with a work visa are usually tied to one particular company actually makes this a form of servitude.

A turning point came in the “Bitter King” battle with Burger King in 2012. When the union’s organising efforts were turned elsewhere, Unite was attacked from behind by a sophisticated union busting campaign. Area managers worked with store managers to target and deregister union members on a store by store basis. As surviving delegates organised resistance, Indian workers found their voice and came to the fore, detailing many instances of super exploitation. After a high profile media campaign where Indian workers talked about “slavery” at BK, the company sued for peace and migrant workers had their first taste of victory. The union has now more members than ever in its history at BK and Indian and Fijian Indian workers are firmly in the leadership group.

Where we have completely broken that climate of fear we have recruited these workers in the hundreds. In Restaurant Brands, which owns the brands KFC, Pizza Hut, Starbucks and Carl’s Jr we have over 2000 members – over 50% of the total staff number.

In the McDonald’s negotiations this year the majority of our bargaining team were migrant workers from India. We have dozens of delegates across the country who have come from India, China, Korea or the Phillipines – to name just a few countries.

The withdrawal of the pathway to residency that the fast food industry was offering often also meant that these workers now had nothing to lose by joining the union. The companies had used the carrot of possible future promotion to keep people in line but with the carrot gone it made our job that much easier.

These companies now have a genuine crisis on their hand. The truth is they have been paying well below market rates for management staff because the workers were focused on future residency not their current wage. It will be very hard for the companies to get anyone who is NZ-born or has permanent residence to run a 24-7 store with up to a hundred staff for around only $40,000.

Unite Union is trying to organise the managers in the fast food industry as well. At Restaurant Brands we have a “protocol” to try and prevent the worst abuses but will be looking at trying to get a collective agreement for managers in the future if we can’t get progress through peaceful dialogue. We actually have a higher union mebership density among managers than we do for the overall workforce at KFC because of the reduced turnover and the fact most managers who get promoted stay members because they trust the union to do the right thing.

But the massive expansion of student numbers in the years ahead will open up a whole new area for potential exploitation and abuse. One thing we must never do, however, is give up on any group of worker. We know from experience that as soon as they have the confidence that we can protect them, the migrant workers will find their voice and help lead the fight against that exploitation.

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