Aiden, where do you think the idea came from. I will give you a hint, colour of their skin and language barriers. And i'm not being racist, just stating facts.

Poirot, this is a public forum and unlike many here I am self employed, and have been for more than twenty years and have seen many changes in the workplace. so if you don't wish to contribute, you can leave at an time.

Steel, sorry I dint spell it out for you, I seriously underestimated your ability to join the dots so as to say, so I will explain it for you.

If you pay your low skilled workers $18 - @22.50 per hour, this is the figure quoted by the FWC, perhaps it was taking weekends into account, then it stands to reason that a highly qualified person, especially one with highly demanded skills become unaffordable, especially when doing business OS.

We have a situation now where medium sized factories that had dozens of welders and fabricators, now have two. They design and build a prototype, then send it off OS to be mass produced. 4x4 accessories are one example, boat builders are another. We simply cant afford to build anything anymore and paying low skilled jobs at near 40 grand a year is ludicrous to say the least.

Rehctub,
I'm not sure what the deal is with trolley collectors but I'll agree with you that they all seem to be foreigners.
Everywhere I go they are of Middle Eastern looking.
I haven't seen a typical Australian looking kid doing a trolley job in 5 - 10yrs I'd guess, and I don't live in a suburb that has a large amount of foreigner ethnicity living in it.
There's either racism or something going on, but somethings not right.
I still stand by what I said about Coles and Woolies.

Dear rehctub,

Give it a break old son. To be saying paying our trolley collectors the minimum wage reduces our international competitiveness because it drives up the wages of welders is just too much.

Let me be clear I want people in my country to be treated decently and not to be paid below the living wage just because it offends your sensibilities.

Many of those who the FWC identified as being exploited were international students. I have talked to quite a few of them. They are paying $23,000 a year to attend a simple TAFE in my area. The money they earn driving taxis, working at & Elevens or hauling trolleys stays in Australia as rent and food expenses. Their direct education expenses are from money borrowed by their families in India or China or the ME that will need to be paid back. It is these funds that have driven education to the third highest export earning sector in our economy and help sustain our quality of life.

What you should be doing is not only making sure they are not exploited but also expressing our gratitude for the funds they provide which go into paying the wages of many Australians. What we shouldn't be doing is wanting them to work for less than what we pay ordinary Australians nor banging on about their race.

We should be better than that.

Dear Shadow Minister,

You wrote;

“Workers on 457 Visas cost a lot more. On top of the same salary as other workers, the costs incl relocation, health cover, schooling etc, but is generally a last resort when the requisite skills are hard to find in Aus.”

Not even close.

My brother recently was made redundant from a top 100 Australian company where he worked in the IT department manipulating databases. His and other divisions within the company have been gradually replaced over the last 2 years by Indian workers under the 457 scheme. Of the over 100 in his area he was one of the last to go. He walked into a new job pretty well straight away so he is pretty philosophical about the whole thing but it certainly pisses me off to no end.

The trick getting workers in for base level programming jobs but making sure they are far more skilled than what the job requires. Then without promoting them have them assume higher level roles and responsibilities. My brother sees it going on throughout the bigger companies all the time now. Entire IT floors are now being populated by 457 visa holders.

To claim the 'skills are hard to find in Aus' certainly hasn't been true in the past in his sector as all those jobs were once held by Australian citizens. However the hollowing out of jobs for Australians by these big IT employers will probably mean that this will be true in the future. As my brother said if he was just starting out then mainframe IT work would not be the sector he would look to to provide future employment. Mentoring and training that was once a hallmark of these jobs has all but disappeared in a decade.

You can try and explain this away but your side of politics is doing this country irreparable harm by having over a million 457 jobs going to non-Australians though it does pander to to those who pour money into Liberal Party coffers.

Steel, the whole reason why this goes on is because we have priced ourselves out of the global market.

I have no problem with a low skilled worker wanting a decent wage, but not for a 9 to 5 38 hour week. You either work longer to make your wage, or smarter.

If we pay almost $40K per year for these low skilled jobs, how do we encourage our future tradies, or engineers, or more so, how do we encourage our future police to work for less than twice this amount while risking death on the job, and that's only once they have qualified.

Doctors spend several years at uni, scrapping by on part time jobs because their studies are so demanding. How do we keep them living on scraps while trolley pushers get the best part of $40K per year even if they don't study.

As I say, if we are going to pay anyone $18 per hour, it should be our own unemployed and let's face it, if the likes of Wollies or Coles sees someone pushing trollies having a go, chances are it will lead to a job.

But by all means keep pushing for high wages for the low skilled, but don't say you have not been warned.

Aiden, Butch,
I think you'll find that employment services and the Neighbourhood House movement are partnered with companies like Bunnings, Coles, Harvey Norman and Woolworths in their adult education programmes for refugees and migrants.
I doubt any of the above corporations would go through the hassle of sponsoring a 457 application when they are getting workers through their so-called philanthropic ventures.
The way it works is that the company sponsors the community education service or signs and MOU undertaking to employ a certain number of refugees once they have been sufficiently trained.
It's a crook system since the people providing the training are altruistic volunteers and the jobs guaranteed, the free market doesn't enter into it and I doubt that many of the trainers realise it's rigged.
If this horrible internship program gets up then the outlook will be even worse for unskilled Australian workers.
Aiden talking about a high skilled workforce is all well and good but importing the most dull witted people from the Third World on forged credentials while pursuing such lofty goals will only further exacerbate the globalist's society of winners and losers.
Dumb people can't compete with smart people and it's widely acknowledged that around 40% of low skilled work will be automated, including agriculture, in the next decade.
You can see examples of this already in India, the expected industrial boom of the last decade has largely failed to alleviate unemployment in the developed zones due to the fact that most of the factories built were highly automated, the Suzuki plants in Guragon are one example.