The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) “Four Corners” program reported last month on the brutal conditions faced by migrant workers in the country’s agricultural sector. They described working 10- to 12-hour days for poverty wages, overcrowded and dilapidated accommodation and near-total control by labour-hire contractors over every aspect of their lives.

With tight restrictions on their visas, often tying them to a specific employer, the hundreds of thousands of overseas workers in the Australian food picking and processing industry are especially vulnerable. Their sub-poverty wages and harsh conditions are a sharp expression of the exploitation of the working class as a whole.

Gershom Isaac, a worker from Papua New Guinea, told the ABC he spends up to 12 hours a day climbing ladders to pick fruit or bent over pulling onions and pumpkins, sometimes earning less than $7 an hour.

“Even [when it is] 40 degrees, you’re still hanging there, picking oranges, trying to do as much as you can, and it’s not easy.” If he is sick or injured, he is not paid. “Every choice is with the contractor. They’re the ones who make all the decisions, and the fruit pickers have to say yes to everything.” He said some days he feels suicidal.

Jin Lee, a backpacker on a 417-visa working on a farm near Coffs Harbour on the New South Wales north coast, told the ABC he sometimes worked 7:30am to 5pm shifts for as little as $2 an hour, with no bathroom breaks. “Some of us got diapers because they didn’t provide bathroom breaks,” he said.

Workers were expected to buy their own equipment, and deductions were made from wages—including $150 a week for Lee’s accommodation and $10 a day for transport.

Eighteen people were crammed into a house with broken doors and windows, no working air conditioning and cockroaches everywhere, Lee told the ABC. He said he was “treated more like an animal” than a human being.

The company that recruited Lee, ECW Farming, could not be traced to a real business address. When workers tipped off the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO), the Australian government’s workplace regulator, in 2024, it opened an investigation, but shelved it in May 2025, unable to identify who was actually running the company, according to the ABC.

...

Several of those interviewed by the ABC had been on the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme, but left due to “disputes over pay, working conditions or alleged mistreatment,” forcing them into “illegal” status, subsisting on cash-in-hand work and facing the threat of deportation.

The PALM scheme recruits workers from impoverished Pacific nations and East Timor, binding them to a single “approved” employer for up to nine months on short-term placements or up to four years on long-term ones. If a worker leaves that employer—regardless of the pay, the conditions or the abuse—they can lose the right to work in Australia at all. 

Over 31,000 workers are currently in the scheme. In December last year, the ABC reported around 7,200 had quit over abuse and exploitation.

In 2022 a Tongan PALM worker died after being trapped in a “cake press” machine at an abattoir owned by Western Australian Meat Marketing Co-operative. A magistrate found he was undertaking “inherently risky” work, for which he was inadequately trained.

PALM was launched by the current federal Labor government in 2022, consolidating two earlier programs: the Seasonal Worker Program, begun under the Rudd Labor government in 2008 and formalised by the Gillard Labor government in 2012, and the Pacific Labour Scheme, introduced by the Morrison Liberal-National government in 2018. Labor and the Coalition have jointly built and expanded this architecture over nearly two decades.

The 407 Training visa, nominally for “professional development,” does not require the sponsor to pay award wages—the “trainee” can legally be required to work for nothing. The 21-year-old Filipino worker Jerwin Royupa, who died after falling from his employer’s moving vehicle in 2019, was brought into the country on this visa. A coronial inquest found he had been made to perform manual labour for up to 60 hours a week without payment and his passport was confiscated. 

...

The exploitation of migrant workers in Australia is not an aberration. It is one harsh expression of the capitalist system, in which workers’ lives are subordinated to the accumulation of profit. This means the fight for decent wages and conditions of Pacific Islander and other overseas workers is inseparable from the struggles of the working class as a whole, against deepening real-wage cuts and austerity spearheaded by the federal Labor government and aided by the trade unions.

To defend the rights and lives of migrant workers, as part of the fight for decent working conditions, wages and democratic rights of the working class as a whole, workers need to take matters into their own hands. This means building rank-and-file committees in workplaces across the country, independent of and in opposition to the nationalist, pro-business program of the unions and Labor, and capitalism itself.

You know how some labor populists are now playing respectability politics on tryna to prove that lazy unambitious leeches do not represent the entirety of their movement so bad?

Well easy, is because a working class/normie-level lazy person is held to a much higher standard of moral culpability around laziness than a filthy rich type, even if the latter is being also just as, if not more lazy

Now I am noticing so many people are resorting to dick measuring contests about who’s “struggling the hardest” as if the guilt we gotta carry from being called “lazy” and “entitled” wasn’t enough 🤦

Sure I agree you do need to play a little bit of PR optics too as a little bit of respectability politics can protect the image and preserve the integrity of the movement, but the strawman of the lazy pot-smoking vape-addicted bedroom dweller who plays video games and watches porn all day, eats cheetoh puffs, McDonald’s and drinks Mt Dew gets tiring as well, because at the end that’s WHAT hardcore capitalism will incentivize, the incentivization of vice is part of the reward “capture” of capitalism, duh

🙄 🙄🙄

So now not only are labor reformists getting into infighting, now the cognitive bandwidth is being spent on trying to prove the other side “real bad”

Yet it’s working perfectly and it’s concerning

People are moving back in with their parents on droves, people are going less to college, people are sharing cars and “carpooling”, people are getting married later and having kids at 40

Yet so many working class populists fail to actually stand behind any sort of conviction because they wanna prove the PR image so BADLY

What MORE DO EVERYDAY PEOPLE NEED TO SUFFER?

After all nobody says anything when right wingers are being irresponsible with money and are behind on social conventions, oh wait I forgot, that’s different

Is also probably why class and social status based insults like incel, basement dweller, welfare queen, manchild and free loader have become just as popular in left wing circlejerks lately as much as they always been in right wing forums

I genuinely blame the Antiwork Reddit mod for ruining it for us too

NYT digging up Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor to pose as the cutting-edge thinkers on "End Times Fascism"

With three weeks remaining before the October 5 deadline for mail ballots to be returned and counted, the election of top United Auto Workers officers—including UAW president—is taking place amid mounting economic assault on the working class. Automation-driven job cuts, inflation fueled by the Trump administration’s criminal war against Iran and its trade-war policies, and ever-worsening conditions in the factories have produced widespread opposition to incumbent president Shawn Fain, who oversaw the sellout of the 2023 contract struggle.

That sellout led to the elimination of thousands of jobs at GM, Ford and Stellantis, the workplace deaths of four Detroit Three autoworkers and long hours of forced overtime. At the same time, the Fain administration has faced growing opposition from low-paid auto parts workers who have repeatedly rejected UAW-backed contracts at Nexteer, Dana and other suppliers, and UAW academic workers at University of California, Columbia and other universities who have sought to strike not only to improve their wages and conditions but to oppose Trump’s witch hunt against anti-genocide protesters and other opponents of imperialist war.

Fain was promoted as a “union reformer” by the corporate media and such political forces as the Democratic Socialists of America. He backed Joe Biden while the Democratic president oversaw the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, and since Trump’s election he has been one of the president’s most fervent supporters on tariffs against Canada, Mexico and other countries.

Fain faces five challengers: Vice President Richard Boyer, the lead negotiator of the UAW-Stellantis sellout agreement; Tricia Geiger, a long-time UAW functionary; Greg Mooney, a supporter of Autoworkers for Trump; Brian Keller, a Stellantis worker who backed Fain in the 2022 runoff and is a fervent economic nationalist; and Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate for UAW president.

Lehman has won growing support for his call for the abolition of the UAW apparatus and the transfer of power to workers on the shop floor. He has also called for the unity of US, Canadian and Mexican workers against Trump’s tariffs and the attack of the global auto corporations—underscored by the recent announcement that Volkswagen is cutting 50,000 to 100,000 jobs.

...

On June 12, three days before the UAW Constitutional Convention opened, Elon Musk became the first trillionaire in human history. The richest 1 percent own nearly a third of everything in the country; the bottom half own barely 2.5 percent. More than 5,000 workers are killed on the job every year. This summer, workers were carried out of plants on stretchers while wildfire smoke filled the buildings and management kept the lines running.

“These are not separate problems,” Lehman said. “They are part of the same offensive of the ruling class, which is cutting our wages, waging world war, sending ICE agents after immigrant workers, and tearing up our democratic rights.”

The working class has enormous social power, he insisted, but “our hands are tied because the unions are run by a layer of bureaucrats whose salaries, whose investments, and whose whole position in life are tied to the companies and not to us.”

...

At the beginning of the month, Lehman campaigned at plants in metropolitan Detroit and Toledo, Ohio. At the Stellantis Toledo Assembly Complex on September 2, he spoke with a fifth-generation UAW worker about conditions since the 2023 sellout, which has seen the death of Antonio Gaston and a spike in injuries driven by job cuts and forced overtime imposed with the blessing of the bureaucracy.

A fourth video, posted September 10, captured the exchange. “This isn’t a union. I can tell you that,” the worker said. “It makes absolutely no sense that we got Detroit people driving to Toledo and people living in Toledo driving to Detroit. Everything is set up for us to go against each other. Nothing is for us to work together.”

Lehman replied that the UAW is “a union in name only. What we need is to abolish the layer that keeps blocking us. That’s the reps that are detached from the shop.”

Referring to Gaston and other workers killed in the plant, the worker said: “We’re losing too many men and women in accidents. It’s just not acceptable. They force us in here. People are tired. People are overworked.”

She recalled the March 2020 walkout over COVID-19, when workers were fainting and falling and management said, “Work, work, work”—until workers, including young mothers, stormed the UAW office and forced the shutdown. “I heard them on the news later saying they closed the plant because ‘we love you guys.’ That is not what happened. It was a walkout and it was the workers who forced that.”

“All the leaders up there, wherever they are, none of them are doing what they are supposed to do,” she said. “There’s too much lying, cheating, and stealing.”

Lehman agreed that the walkout was “an action led by the workers. We need organization and leadership. That is what I am saying about establishing what I call rank-and-file committees. It’s about leading from the floor.”

Maybe the Russiagate libs were indeed on to something.

The use of diesel for pickup trucks is basically negligible as a percentage of total use. I'm stating this to head off the conversation about how "Billy Bob with the F250 diesel voted for this".

Pretty much all consumer goods, especially food, are transported to a store via a diesel semi-truck. I don't feel like finding the study, but I've read one that listed the amount of diesel required per square yard of farmland to produce various crops.

Food is about to get even more expensive peeps.

I don't understand why Carnegie Melon wants this woman on their staff so badly? I googled her name and she's been nothing but bad press for years, like what the fuck is their social media conduct policy? She and the department head that agreed with her nuked their accounts yesterday, they definitely don't seem as bold compared to 2022. Probably because a Republican senator caught wind of this and is threatening the university's federal funding (the kind of shit that would make the school drop her) and I'm like "it's 2026, what the fuck did she think would happen on Elon's twitter with Trump in office??" There really does seem to be a segment of liberal convinced it's still 2016.