Restrictions on working hours make the life of migrant workers more miserable. They apply to different visas and include student visas, which are limited to working up to 48 hours per fortnight. Different justifications are given for these restrictions, but for the Australian government they are apparently intended to maintain the primary focus of students on their studies and prevent the ‘misuse’ of visas.
However, the reality is that working hour restrictions make it difficult to meet living expenses legally. On a minimum wage, a student can legally earn up to $634.56 per week. Once accounting for exorbitant tuition fees, ever-increasing visa costs, landlords jacking up rents, and expensive basic goods, it is hard to imagine how international students can manage financially. And it must be hard for parliament to imagine as well.
That is because working hour restrictions are not about international students’ needs, nor their study obligations. After all, students cannot focus on their studies when they are barely treading water financially. Instead, restrictions are a mechanism for the government to control the labour market.
This was made clear during the COVID pandemic, when working restrictions were thrown out the window to address workforce shortages. However, once this need for essential workers was resolved, suddenly concerns about visa ‘misuse’ and students not focusing on their studies reappeared, and restrictions were reintroduced. It’s clear that the limits on working hours are not based on some principled rule. But what are they based on?
There is one group that clearly benefits from work restrictions – bosses. If migrant workers cannot meet their needs legally within their permitted hours, they need to work unlawfully in breach of their visa conditions. This, in turn, puts the chips in the bosses’ hands.
For instance, bosses can offer an employee extra hours of work under the table, paying in cash and below minimum wage. The boss presents this as a fair deal – they get to cut wages and migrants get more hours and money. However, it is far from a fair deal. Bosses get their work needs met more cheaply by not paying minimum wages, boosting their profits, while workers must accept scraps. If migrants are discontent about this, bosses can threaten deportation to maintain compliance.
In Australia, businesses and whole industries rely on this model of exploitation to run, and many bosses have built their fortunes off the back of underpaid international students and migrant workers. And as long as visa restrictions serve the interests of bosses, the government will be more than happy to keep them in place. This is why they made an exception during the pandemic – when bosses’ needed workers critically, they were willing to reduce their power over migrants and have restrictions removed temporarily.
What happens if I work above my visa restrictions?
Disclaimer: this is not legal advice, but general information
So, what happens if you work too many hours? Working above your restrictions can carry legal consequences including the risk of visa cancellation. There have been recent changes to prevent visa cancellation where you have breached a work-related visa condition due to workplace exploitation, with some qualifications:
- There must be no other reason to cancel your visa (such as national security, character or fraud)
- You have experienced workplace exploitation in the last 12 months
- You have sought support and are trying to resolve the issue
- You have agreed in writing to follow your visa conditions in the future.
However, there is little protection where the breaches are not caused by specific workplace exploitation, but instead by a need to meet living costs by working more hours. This is how the visa system establishes a supply of readily exploitable workers for bosses, and only punishes bosses where their exploitation goes too far beyond this. That, of course, assumes that the illegal acts of bosses are detected and punished, which is rare.
Given that legal protection is limited, you will need advice based on your particular circumstances. You can get this from your union, a community legal centre, or a lawyer, so as to navigate your options. Get in touch with us and we can make a recommendation.
The bigger picture
If bosses can use the visa system to screw over international students and migrant workers, and there are few legal protections, what can we do? By no means do we have to accept this situation lying down. Ultimately, we need to abolish work restrictions to reduce the power bosses have over workers. The question is, how do we do this, when politicians are beholden to their rich business friends?
The first step is to get together with other workers in our workplaces and our unions. Building networks of solidarity in the workplace and across industries, we can challenge the power and interests of bosses on matters of wages as well as broader issues like the visa system. For this to be possible, we need to build a high level of solidarity between migrant and citizen workers.
If you are interested in fighting back against bosses, get in touch with us at Migrants Building Power – a network of workers on and off visas developing skills and connections to build power at our workplaces.