Life on the West Island - Blackbirding?

For 17 years, the West Island has maintained a guest worker programme that allows businesses to hire temporary workers from nine Pacific island countries and Timor-Leste. The scheme provides for participating workers to work in seasonal agricultural jobs for up to nine months, or in longer-term jobs for between one and four years. The scheme was launched as the Pacific Seasonal Worker Pilot Scheme in 2008 and initially only permitted employment in the nation's agricultural sector, but has since expanded to other industries, including meat processing and aged care. It is now known as the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme.

The scheme has been hailed as a success by employers and governments, but there has also been consistent criticism that many participants have been exploited or injured while on PALM visas. This week, investigations by two public broadcasters have revealed worrying problems.

For example, Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) publicised the experiences of a woman from the Solomon Islands:

Ethel used to work long days picking fruit in regional NSW. But after falling off a tractor four months ago, she can barely move. The 33-year-old first came to Australia from Solomon Islands in 2022 under the federal government's Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme.

The PALM scheme is a temporary visa program designed to plug Australia's labour shortages by recruiting workers from nine Pacific Island nations and Timor-Leste.
Ethel — whose name SBS News has changed for privacy reasons — was initially employed under the scheme to work on a farm in northern Queensland but left after just four months.
The take-home pay was more modest than she expected. After deductions, she says there was barely enough left to survive on, let alone support her family in Solomon Islands — the main reason she joined the scheme.

Ethel says $1,100 was deducted from her first pay for reasons that were unclear, leaving her with $500. Then, after paying rent and transport, she had only $200 left over.
"Family at home [were] asking for more money and we would send but we [were] left with nothing and that's why we left the PALM scheme," she tells SBS News.

She's among the thousands of workers who have absconded from the scheme, citing poor working conditions, exploitation and, in some instances, abuse. The Department of Home Affairs confirmed in a statement to SBS News that there are more than 7,000 disengaged PALM scheme workers in Australia. Many are living either unlawfully (without a visa) or on a bridging visa awaiting further determination.

As a disengaged worker without a visa, Ethel has no work rights or access to government support, relying instead on the help of the local community, volunteers, and charities. It's a situation that has left her — and many others — vulnerable to exploitation and injury.

Since leaving the PALM scheme in 2022, Ethel has been working illegally in regional Australia, receiving cash in hand. In August this year, while working at a farm in the regional NSW town of Leeton, she fell off a tractor and severely injured her leg.

Ethel spent a week in bed before the president of the volunteer-run Leeton Multicultural Support Group, Paul Maytom, was alerted. He took her to hospital where she spent three weeks and underwent three surgeries. When asked what would have happened if Maytom hadn't intervened, Ethel couldn't bring herself to answer, just shaking her head and pursing her lips. "Paul helped me so much, I thank Paul so much and Red Cross," she says.

Maytom first arrived in Leeton in 1967 to pick fruit. He served on the local council for 34 years and was mayor for 16 of those. Now retired, the 77-year-old spends his time helping disengaged workers like Ethel, even using his own money to pay for her medication. "The people that I've worked with over the last 18 months, they're people that either don't have enough money because they've got sick, or they got injured and there's no cover," he tells SBS News.

ABC News reported on a similar situation of a worker whose employment was terminated when she became pregnant:

When Susan Pinu was pregnant with her daughter, she was far from her home in Solomon Islands and found herself wandering an Australian town looking for help.

It was not what she expected when she joined the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme in 2021, hoping to build a house and support her family back home with her income.

More than two years after moving to Australia and becoming a fruit picker, she was without work and carrying her daughter Angella in the New South Wales Riverina town of Leeton, having left the PALM scheme.

She is one of an estimated 7,200 PALM workers who have left their employers on the scheme — a decision putting the labourers in breach of their visa conditions.

Workers such as Ethel and Susan were trying to support families in their home countries by working on PALM visas, but left after being exploited, abused or assaulted. They have tried to stay on, but if things go wrong, they have no coverage under workers compensation or Medicare. All too often they labour on piece work at wages well below the norm, are forced to live in cramped and dirty conditions and are threatened with being exposed to authorities and deported if they complain.

This exploitation by employers in rural and caring industries has been reported over many years, with little positive action resulting to assist the 7,200 affected Pacific islanders. It is left to sympathetic community members and ethnic groups to pick up the pieces. Their plight makes them a 21^st Century equivalent to the fate of the virtual slave labourers of the shameful “blackbirding” era. The West Island could, and should, be better than this.