The organisation’s director, Abbey Kendall, says Naomi’s is not the only case her organisation is managing and that the situation for international students is dire. “For international students, they’re living in another world when it comes to work,” Kendall said. “If you are an international student you are lucky to get the minimum wage in Adelaide. Usually we think about labour markets as being our normal industrial relations system and black markets, where people do cash-in-hand or work off the books. These international students exist in a labour market that sits outside our industrial relations system. This is farm-to-table. It happens on the farms up through to the restaurants, to the cleaning services. And it’s not just South Australia. It’s everywhere.”

“Its everywhere’: the foreign students exposing Australia’s Wage theft epidemics’ The Guardian, Australia News, by Royce Kurmelovs, Thursday 3 September 2020.

Abbey Kendall, the director of Working Women’s Centre in South Australia, said her organisation has dealt with countless wage theft cases – at least ten queries a week. ‘In the last 3 months, we have met with dozens of international students who tell us they are being paid between $6 and $15 an hour,’ she told Daily Mail Australia. ‘Most of these students should have been earning $25 an hour. Many of these students are still in employment, being paid $15 less than what they’re entitled to but they cannot afford to lose their jobs.’

“How Australian businesses are ripping off foreign students by paying them as little as $6 an hour because they count on their victims not knowing their legal rights” Daily Mail Australia, News, by Claudia Popski, Thursday 3 September 2020

Abbey Kendall, Director of the Working Women’s Centre SA (WWC) speaks to some of that confusion. “There is a duty for employers to provide a safe workplace, but that doesn’t spell out what that means with regards to sexual harassment,” Kendall tells The Adelaide Review. “So, if the legislation said that you had to have a policy, or you had to have training – that would be a huge step in forcing cultural change”. Likewise, some might be surprised to learn that currently sexual harassment is not considered so serious a workplace offence that it could automatically attract dismissal.

 “More South Australians are returning to workplaces, but sexual harassment and exploitation shouldn’t”, The Adelaide Review, by Gemma Beale, 22 May 2020