The community was shocked by recent footage of a young woman working at Funtea being hit and kicked after she accused her former boss of wage theft and stood up for her rights as a worker.
The Greens have previously raised the issue of wage theft in Parliament, most recently when Greens Industrial Relations spokesperson Tammy Franks questioned the Treasurer around what was being done to protect international students working in South Australia from wage theft and exploitation.
Quotes attributable to Tammy Franks MLC:
“It is unacceptable that in South Australia, in Adelaide, we see a young woman like this not as an individual aberration but as an endemic statistic, and that we see the Marshall government look away from these young people. They are entrusted to our country by their families, believing we have a safe society for them to work in not just safely but with dignity and respect, and with a wage appropriate to their work. Yet they have been abandoned by our government with the cuts to the Young Workers Legal Service and with the abrogation of the duties of SafeWork SA to act on these matters.”
“This is just the most recent example highlighting the routine exploitation of international students in South Australia, and it has to stop. The Government has had more than enough evidence and time to act, so if they won’t, I’m telling them now that the Parliament will.”