1001EHR Lecture 3: Work and Employability Lecture week 3
30 May 2018
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Work and Employability Lecture week 3
How do student employees get shafted?
• Unpaid hours
• Unpaid trials or unpaid internships
• Sexual harassment
• Inadequate breaks
• Mistreatment and excessive control
• Danger
Where does it happen?
• On the demand (product market) side, most common where firms
o Give top priority to reducing costs
o Experience high levels of price- based competition
o Have low awareness of their responsibilities
o See scope for exploiting labour
• Hierarchical contracting used to maximize profits at the top and to push costs down
to lower levels, reduce accountability of the top: e.g. via
o Franchising (e.g. fast food and retail)
o Using labour hire (e.g. manufacturing, mining)
o Contracting and subcontracting (e.g. TCF, road transport)
• This increases pressure on smaller, peripheral firms to minimize costs and breach
labour standards
As student employees, and as future employees, what are your rights and responsibilities in
the workplace?
• Rights
o In awards
o National employment standards
o In other law
o In common law
• Responsibilities
o In common law: to act in good faith in your dealing with employer (see
employment Relations Law)
• Specific rights and responsibilities will vary between countries and jurisdictions, we’ll
focus on your situation here
What types of employees are most easily exploited, and how does this occur?
• Labour market segmentation and secondary labour markets
• Migrants
o Students visas temporary migrants
o 7/11
• 457 visa temporary migrants
• permanent migrants
o TCF outworkers
• Co-ethnicity
o May seem to reduce recruitment costs but
o History of exploitation (esp when bosses of same ethnicity)
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
How do student employees get shafted: unpaid hours, unpaid trials or unpaid internships, sexual harassment. Inadequate breaks: mistreatment and excessive control, danger. As student employees, and as future employees, what are your rights and responsibilities in the workplace: rights. In common law: to act in good faith in your dealing with employer (see employment relations law: specific rights and responsibilities will vary between countries and jurisdictions, we"ll focus on your situation here. Individual undervaluation (via pay discrimination, career barriers) of female employees in male dominated work. Individual or collective harassment: low-paid occupations, less power, more replaceable, often overlap with above categories. Low power: low awareness, limited english language skills, threats of being reported to authorities, deportation, threats of violence, fragmented, not collectively organized, easily replaced, easily dismissed and hard to prove dismissed illegally, discrimination. There are two collectives directly involved in the employment relationship: ngos (non-government organizations other than unions, e. g, overseas- india, korea, us migrant resource centers etc.
