Leleiga Fetui, left, from Falease’ela, Samoa, is on his fourth visit. Growers of citrus fruits, grapes, garlic etc often have difficulty finding sufficient workers at harvest time, harvest work provides variable seasonal work all over Australia. Seasonal farm workers are essential to farms across WA and Australia. All workers who enter Australia to take part in the Seasonal Worker Programme must continue to be employed by their sponsor (employer) for the duration of their placement in Australia. Timor-Leste has upwards of 10,000 people impatiently waiting for the chance to deploy to Australia and has been actively seeking access for some of them. “I’m frustrated here also because during this pandemic, everything is hard.”, • Travel and research was supported by funding from the Melbourne Press Club’s Michael Gordon Fellowship program, Available for everyone, funded by readers. People who had relied on the work and planned their futures around the income suddenly found themselves on flights home to unemployment and lockdowns. Seasonal workers are covered by the minimum entitlements under the National Employment Standards. PLS workers are protected by Australian workplace laws, in the same manner as Australian workers. Travel Your visa will be granted with multiple entry, which means you may be able to travel outside Australia and return during your period of Seasonal Work, you should notify your employer if you intend to depart Australia, before the conclusion of your employment. Requirements of seasonal workers. Others have found a dangerous lack of care, alleged abuse and intimidation, and reported workers surviving by eating the food they are meant to pick. But some say it’s a waste of time because local hires and backpackers – who are working their 88 days to get a visa extension – don’t seem to stick around. There isn’t. Hillwood Berries has signed up for when Tasmania can bring the workers in, although he doesn’t know yet how much the flights will be – the business will be paying for everything above the workers’ capped cost – or which supply countries will opt back in. At one end of the spectrum it is seen as Australia’s greatest form of foreign aid, which simultaneously fills a domestic workforce shortage. Two young women dance and have a giggle, while feverishly picking and packing berries from the rows of vines stretching for 35 hectares around us. In essence the issue is this: a large proportion of Australia’s harvest labour is done by people from abroad who are unable to travel. It keeps people connected to their community and their culture, he says. When Covid-19 shut Australia’s borders and grounded global flights, the seasonal worker program was thrown into disarray. 175 local seasonal workers jetted out of the country yesterday for Australia to join other Pacific countries to formally join the restart of Australia’s labour mobility programs. Many workers choose to return again and again. Hailing from various tropical islands in the Pacific, everyone’s rugged up against the mild chill of a Tasmanian summer. Covid-19 travel restrictions mean Australia faces a shortage of farm labour for summer harvest. Back then the plan was to meet the people coming to Australia every year, for up to nine months at a time, to pick Australia’s produce. If this doesn’t change the result is likely to be shortages and price rises for horticultural products and, even more seriously, devastating hardship for our primary producers. Michael Rose is a research fellow and anthropologist at the Australian National University, and the author of Indigenous Spirits and Global Aspirations in a Southeast Asian Borderland: Timor-Leste’s Oecussi Enclave, Australia could include Pacific labourers in 'travel bubble' as $280m aid shake-up revealed, Tuvalu threatens to exit Australia's seasonal worker program after deputy PM's comments. Without any chance to prepare, workers lost their income, and some couldn’t access their superannuation in Australia. Find your ideal job at SEEK with 1,057 seasonal jobs found in All Australia. 1,000s of New Jobs Added Every Day. Some of the seasonal workers at their cottage at Burlington Berries. “I think all of the approved employers here take the responsibilities around it … really, really seriously,” Slater says. In roughly the same period, some 8,000 seasonal workers from the Pacific and Timor-Leste were working in Australia as part of the seasonal worker program. “I have a little business but it’s all stopped because there are no markets, everything is closed,” she says. You must pay an application fee. In 2013 personal remittances made up almost 20% of Samoa’s GDP. In Orrvale Simaiki acts as a father figure and, given that most of the worker community are Samoan, he feels a responsibility to take care of them, especially the young men who “enjoy the lifestyle” too much. Photograph: Carly Earl. Staff travel to Vanuatu to interview workers, connecting them with community groups and services once here. He says “this is a life-changing opportunity for us”. The program was set up specifically to avoid this type of exploitation and has largely been successful. There is no suggestion that any of the farms that Guardian Australia visited or photographed for this article have been subject of such complaints or allegations. “Sometimes they will miss me or sometimes say, ‘It’s all right, Mum.’”, Manuela Dos Santos working on the Hillwood Berries site in Tasmania, Dos Santos wants to send her girls, now five and eight, to college one day. Photograph: Darren James, Kim Slater says her Launceston company, Linx employment, takes an active role in recruitment and pastoral care. Photograph: Bernardino Soares. Overseas seasonal workers have been locked out of New South Wales under tighter border restrictions introduced last night. You must be at least 18 years old. Those who stayed behind found work on other farms when their usual season ended but were separated from their families by oceans, and with no idea when they might be reunited. You can have more than one employer, but you must then have received a concrete offer from each employer. It needs to be considered a matter of national priority. Older women with a few seasons under their belt are over the drama – they’ve seen affairs form and fail around them, seen fresh young egos blow in on their first season and get caught up in a party scene. Photograph: Carly Earl. The Australian Government is attempting to pinch our seasonal workers in a bid to strengthen their agricultural harvesting industry by offering New Zealanders $2000 to move across the ditch. “It’s not hard for me and I earn money, then go back. “Complaints include the provision of substandard accommodation, deductions of up to 60% of wages for lodging and board, long hours and excessive or unpaid overtime, and lack of access to health care,” Union Aid Abroad said. Affordable Accommodation for Seasonal Workers. How many will be left is unknown, but it will be a lot fewer than 32,000. The best part of it is that seasonal work in Australia is so easy to find. Clearly, if nothing is done, a labour shortage on Australian farms going into the summer harvest season is a real possibility. “Last year when I went back to Timor I helped my father and my mother and built a house for them.”, Antonio Pinto at Hillwood Berries. The workers we meet in Tasmania are all aware of the horror stories but few have major complaints of their own, except for the cost of sometimes crowded accommodation. She says they have pushed for more women, which was met with some resistance from community leaders who thought women should stay home. It also contributes to the economic development of seasonal workers from nine participating Pacific Island countries and Timor-Leste. “The fact that there’s such a valuable contributor to your business, you’d be silly to put it at risk.”. We are sailing into a food shortage and few are talking about it. But post-Covid, both growers and workers tell us they’ve heard of worrying conditions from their former colleagues who found work interstate. You can work for a few days, weeks or months, totally up to you. “When we speak, they are crying but they understand me because they know I’m the one being strong for them,” Dos Santos says. If you need money, there is always something that needs picking somewhere, so you never need to worry about finances. Speaking over the phone from Dili, Manuela Dos Santos tells us she caught one of the last flights home amid the panic of the early pandemic months. There are fewer than 7,000 still in the country, largely people who were working on six-month contracts when the borders shut. Photograph: Darren James. The emotions are amplified by deep homesickness. Once they are in a job the workers have few choices – they largely stay where the grower has organised, and must pay back the cost of it, as well as their flights and sometimes visas, insurance and other costs – before they draw a full income from the picking. The NGO says some conditions amount to modern slavery. Such a path would be imminently realistic for Australia. The workers flew out of the country at 5 pm on Wednesday on a special chartered flight operated by Virgin. With not enough workers to pick the upcoming harvest, Australia faces potential food shortages, and its farmers face economic devastation, Last modified on Fri 14 Aug 2020 02.21 BST. When Covid-19 shut Australia’s borders and grounded global flights, the seasonal worker program was thrown into disarray. Ben Doherty’s reporting on the sad story of Silas Aru from Vanuatu who found himself underfed and underpaid in central Queensland makes for essential reading, but it is significant that when it came to light this case ended up in the federal court. In the meantime she’s enjoying the extra time with her daughters, even though they are struggling financially. A few weeks later Dos Santons is in touch again, and she’s wondering if there’s any news about flights restarting for Timorese workers. “In Samoa there’s no factories or anything like that – they rely on coconuts and taro but you can’t get that all the time, and mother nature comes and destroys the crops,” says Pastor Napota Simaika, a Shepparton resident and a Samoan community leader who acts as a go-between for growers and Samoan workers. Employers must be approved by the Australian government and are given strict guidelines surrounding employment conditions and pastoral care. Suifua and Siniva – Leleiga’s mother and wife – at home in Samoa. “They’ll be able to make three years worth of income in 18 months, and I think they’re happy with that but it’s been tough to not to get back and see families and children,” he says. Some workers share hotel rooms but a large group are in makeshift dorms in the venue’s function halls, with temporary dividers creating rooms. We first started reporting for this story in early 2019. Reopening the seasonal worker program could be a moment in which the Australia-Pacific partnership comes of age, pointing the direction to a future defined by mutual help rather than development aid. It’s hard and physical work, for a guaranteed minimum of 30 hours a week, and taxed at a flat 15%. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. My previous blog highlighted the plight of seasonal workers in Australia just before the government announced its new Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP) visa arrangements in response to COVID-19 restrictions.The purpose of this blog is to report on feedback from Approved Employers (AEs) who have seasonal workers employed in Australia regarding how their workers are faring. While worker exploitation can, unfortunately, never be entirely legislated out of existence, the evidence that the seasonal workers program dramatically reduces it is strong. A seasonal worker picks strawberries on a Tasmanian farm. But, despite the red tape, a 2016 joint parliamentary committee inquiry into the program heard exploitation of program participants was “common”. Another farm, Hillwood Berries, has its workers housed at a hotel north of Launceston, a sprawling complex in faux “Grand Tudor” style. “The money … is to support my family, to pay for my sister and brothers’ school, and also to build them a house in my village,” he says. It’s something between a workplace, with all its office politics, and a school or college camp with all its drama. What were they sacrificing to do so, and why? Tour Guide: There are many tourism companies who hire backpackers as tour guides especially if they are multilinguistic, some companies may even provide travel expenses. The number of Pacific seasonal workers in Australia has progressively increased since 2008, but remains small in comparison both to the overall number of foreign workers operating in these sectors, mainly backpackers, and to New Zealand’s equivalent Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) Scheme. Fun seasonal workers australia they just want to make their money and go home agreement. 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