The A (Asparagus), B (Broccoli) and C (Cheap labour) of illegal immigration: A Case Study from Australian Agriculture
Who dotes on illegal immigrants more than woke liberals do? Avaricious employers on the lookout for cheap labour, that’s who.
Australia's largest grower of asparagus and broccoli, Vizzari Farms in the state of Victoria, is currently on trial for hiring dozens of illegal immigrants at illegally low wages as vegetable packers(https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-27/vegetable-grower-faces-court-over-sham-contracting-allegations/12002232). Back in 2016, Australian Border Force officers raided Vizzari Farms and discovered 61 immigrants (from Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia and Thailand) who were “unlawful non-citizens” (i.e. illegal immigrants such as visa overstayers) and a further 28 legal immigrants who were intentionally breaching their holiday visa conditions by working on the company’s farms. Recruited through word-of-mouth, and in full knowledge of the immigration illegality involved, the foreign workers were being paid well below the legally-mandated rate of pay.
Vizzari Farms is the largest supplier of asparagus and broccoli to Australia’s two biggest supermarkets, where over half of all Australians buy their fruit and veg. Vizzari Farms’ multi-million dollar business model of using cheap foreign labour is crucial to their highly profitable market dominance in the supermarket supply chain. The supermarket giants also benefit from the grower’s cheap foreign labour racket through buying cheaper veg and outcompeting rival retail outlets on price.
Vizzari Farms sits atop what is likely to be a very big iceberg of cheap foreign labour in Australian agriculture. In 2019, for example, the National Union of Workers investigated some 650 temporary migrant farm workers (mostly from south-east Asia and the Pacific) in Sunraysia and the Goulburn Valley in Victoria (https://www.crikey.com.au/2019/07/23/migrant-workers-intimidated-killed-australian-farms/), finding that two-thirds of the workers were being paid below the legal pay rate (then $23.66 an hour) with some paid as little as $4.60 an hour. Two-thirds of the foreign workers did not hold a valid work visa.
The woke left’s reflexive, ‘anti-racist’ prostration before saintly, non-white immigrants makes it an ally of law-breaking, a facilitator of corporate profiteering, and an obstacle to jobs and proper wages for Australian workers. No wonder the traditional, white working class is deserting the contemporary left. The wages of wokeness is political irrelevance.