Wait… This Is Legal?

Last year, I worked on an egg farm.

7am starts. No lunch break. One 15-minute smoko.

Lifting a tonne of eggs a day. Collecting dead birds.

Driving half an hour each way.

And I was being paid less than the minimum wage.

Not by accident.

Not cash-in-hand.

Legally.

In this episode, I walk through what it’s actually like to work under the pastoral award in Australia, where minimum wage isn’t always minimum, penalty rates don’t exist, and “fair go” starts to look more like a marketing slogan than a reality.

This isn’t a rant. It’s a field note.

From inside a system that most people don’t even know exists.

Content Note
This podcast gets into bodies, panic attacks, trauma, sexism, mental health, and the occasional emotional sinkhole. Please look after yourself only listen when you feel safe to engage with potentially triggering material. 
Also, I swear.

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Credits
Recorded on the lands of the Ramindjeri and Ngarrindjeri peoples.
Sovereignty never ceded.

Recorded & edited at Ridley Farm Studio by Luke Ridley
https://ridleyfarmstudio.com.au...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

I'm recording this episode in Port Elliot where I'm currently house sitting, and I'm house sitting two beautiful little white fluff balls. Um, they're gorgeous dogs. I don't actually know what they are, but they are lovely. Um they can get a little bit yappy. So my bedroom is actually the master bedroom, the mistress bedroom. It's the main bedroom, it faces the street, um, and they can get a bit yappy, but they can also get yappy if they're not in the room. So they're in the room with me, and I've given them a great big they love duck jerky, so I've given them a whole breast each, which is big for little dogs. It's a problem. The little one's got the gag reflex of a straight die on grinder, and so you might hear her. The slightly bigger one who's still small, um, leaks it like a lollipop. So I don't know whether I should have had them in and they're in. And as you know, if you've been here for a little while, is I'm I like to do sometimes I do two takes. The way that I work as a podcaster is I'll normally do a rehearsal, and then the next time I'll try and get it all out there. Um, because otherwise, you know, if you have to re-record and re-record and re-record, you can kind of lose the energy that you've got for your for your topic. So I wanted to just set the scene. Um, when you record a podcast, I record this, I record in two ways. Um, the way I'm doing today is straight onto voice note on my iPhone. So I'm holding my iPhone. I've got a uh my mini microphone that attaches to my iPhone and has a little wind sock on it. I don't know if it makes any difference. I think it's just another phallic symbol in my life. Um and you try and my the guy who edits when I'm doing it in studio, Luke Ridley. Shout out Luke, um, says to try and get a dead room. So that's a room with not much noise and you know, like soft furnishing. So a bedroom, a walk-in wardrobe's the best place. Um, this house doesn't have a walk-in wardrobe, so the bedroom's the next best place. Um, but if you can hear noises, oh, and I realised I just left the fan on and I don't know how to turn it off. Anyway, hello, I hope you're all well. How are you doing? How are you doing? Really, how how are you doing? I want to say it's a bit weird for me to say that when there's no one in the room except two of the dogs, but I mean, how are you doing? Today's episode, episode nine, um, is about something that's occurred in my life quite recently that that is an inequality I did not know existed within Australia and really surprised me. Really surprised me. Like at first, it was I kept digging and digging because I thought surely this can't be true. That faces tens that's something tens of thousands of people face every time they get paid in Australia. So, hello, hello, welcome to my podcast. Um, yes, I'm scrolling through my notes. No, I'm not gonna stop this and start again. You can just get the full-on experience, the direct experience of what it's like to be a boots on the ground podcaster. Last year, for six months, between June and December, I was legally paid less than the minimum wage. And look, it wasn't a cash-in-hand job, it wasn't dodgy, it wasn't under the table, it was by a company that turns over hundreds of millions of dollars a year, a very well-known local South Australian brand, and I was paid legally paid less than the minimum wage. From June to December, I worked on an egg farm. I needed a job, a casual job. My background is in marketing and comms, uh, customer service. A bit further back in my history, I spent a long time in a call centre, so I applied for all of that locally. Nothing. Found out, forgot that nepotism is alive and well in regional South Australia. That's okay, that's how this society functions. But then I saw this Facebook post, it was an egg farm, and I thought, how hard can that be? I grew up on a farm, I've house, we had lots of chooks, I've house sat for a commercial chook farm. They had 80 free-range choks. Um, and I thought, yeah, yeah, I can do that. How hard can it be? Turns out it was very, very hard. Seven o'clock starts, 2:30 p.m. finishes. Um, on the first day, I got home, I lay down on the bed with my shoes on, which, if you know me, is something I never ever, I'm a shoes off in the house girl. I lay down on the bed and I thought I'll just lie here until I can get up and have a shower. Anyway, when I next looked at the clock, it was six o'clock in the morning. I didn't have a shift that next day because I was casual and part-time. Um, so that was fine. But like I and the thing to know about that is too, I never sleep through the night. Um, I'm a very light sleeper, so I was just physically exhausted. We hadn't had a lunch break, we didn't get a lunch break. Um, the first within the first couple of things I was asked by a colleague, well told by a colleague, was hey, we get a 30-minute unpaid lunch break, but instead of that, no, it was unpaid. We get a 30-minute unpaid lunch break, so instead of taking the lunch break, we just go home half an hour early. And I thought, oh, okay, that sounds good. So we got a 15-minute paid smoke break. So we took that, and we normally took that after at least five hours of work, and that's all we got, and it was back breaking work, but I needed the job. Um, I love Chooks, was on a farm, it was a pretty drive there and back past the Port Elliott Bakery, fantastic. And then I got my first pay. I'd read my contract and I knew which award I was under. But I I got my but also at the time that I started the job was when um the minimum pay in Australia had gone up about a dollar an hour, and I knew what that minimum rate was because I'd looked it up. And on my pay slip, I noticed I was being underpaid by about 93 cents an hour, like below the minimum wage. And I thought, oh, it's probably just a system delay, sometimes with a new pay rise, it can take a little while for computers to catch up. And I because I was casual and I became very clear to me that I was never going to be an Olympic standard poultry worker, um, I thought I don't want to be that person who rings up HR and says, Oh, actually, I think you're underpaying me. Because I really wanted to keep getting shifts, you know, and there's a kind of unwritten rule is that when you're casual and when you're new, you just don't complain. I thought, oh, it'll all work itself out, you know, they'll backpay me fine. But then the next fortnight it kept happening, and then the one after that, I thought, oh, six weeks to get your computer system squared away is a bit long for a hundred million dollar company. So I looked up, I looked up the award, I couldn't quite figure out what was going on, so I called Fairwork. And they said, Oh yeah, under the pastoral award, you don't have to be paid minimum wage. I said, What? And they kind of started to talk slower. Like, you know how some I think it was a liberal or maybe it was a one nation senator who or politician who recently, or I don't know, somebody connected to a government party said, Oh, people in the country speak slower. Like what? Or think slower. Anyway, so that person on the other end of the phone said, under your award, you don't have to be paid the minimum wage, and if you've signed a contract, that's what you've agreed to. And I just thought, how can that is this the Middle Ages? How how can that be possible in fair go, easygoing, you know, um battle, you know, battlers in Australia? How how can that be possible? You know, and it was one of those moments where your brain just goes, what the absolute fuck. And and this is what and I want to say this is what inequality looks like. This is what boots on the ground, first hand experience, the experience of tens of thousands of people in this case. This is what we experience. You know, wealthy people getting wealthier and us being paid under the minimum wage legally in a country that talks all the time about a fair go, and the Labour Party and the unions splash all over the media that the minimum people on the minimum wage are getting a pay rise. Forgetting to say, omitting that there's plenty of people out there in Australia that legally get paid below the minimum wage. It gets worse. So I'm doing this job, and I really quite enjoyed the work on one level because it was physical and I was doing stuff I didn't think I could do as a 50 mid-50s woman. I mean, I was 53 at the time and I'm 54 now. Um, people have told me not to be so extra on the podcast. Anyway, I was I was doing things with my body I didn't think I could do, I was getting muscles, um, I was sleeping a lot better, you know. I was moving about a ton of eggs on my own each day. Um I was I loved the Chook so much. Um yeah, like I was really enjoying it. And so one day my boss came to and I adored my boss, I loved my boss, and he came to me one day and said, Oh, could you I didn't normally work weekends, and he said, Oh, could you cover a couple of shifts on the weekend? And I said, Absolutely, and then in my brain, I'm like, oh good penalty rates, yay. Uh guess what? You work weekends, no penalty rates. Not for a Saturday, not for a Sunday. You work longer hours, so let's say if my shift finished at 2.30 and I worked until three or four, I didn't get overtime. The only time you got extra was public holidays. And you got double time. That's it. And let me give you, let me kind of zoom out a bit and give you a bigger picture of the job. It was five barns, five sheds of chickens, and in each shed there were up to 10,000 chickens in each one. So you started off the day by walk doing a walkthrough of each shed and collecting the dead chickens, and there were always dead chickens, sometimes hundreds of them, but more often than not, it was sort of between five and ten in each shed. You'd check the feed and the water and the temperature, make sure the airflow was okay. And then after you'd finished that, you'd run the eggs, and that means there's a machine in each shed. There's like a shed at the end of the barn, and you run the eggs, and the machine kind of eggs come out to you on a conveyor belt. There's only one person needs to run the eggs because it's a quite sophisticated machine, but you still need to physically lift the eggs, so lift the eggs off the conveyor belt and like stack them on a pallet. Yeah, and and I worked it out and I was lifting about a ton of eggs every day per shift. So it's basically the world's worst crossfit class with chickens. Um, in my contract, it said that you were not required to lift more than 11 kilos like at once, but the pallets weighed about 45 kilos, and because it was only one person in a shed, and you'd lift at least one pallet per shed, sometimes two. Um, and and you you just did it on your own. Like, what was the alternative? Calling one of the boys and stopping them because everything was timed. Oh my god, everything was timed. We had to write everything down, every egg was counted, the waste was counted, it was all you know very paperwork driven. The amount of food each chook ate was calculated. Like, so if I called one of the boys, because I was usually the only woman on shift. If I called one of them over to help me, I'm stopping them doing their job. So it's not tiring work, it's body breaking work. Um my rotator cuff started to play up and get inflamed. Um that that was the main physical injury that I had, and I needed the money, so I just had to kind of power through. Oh, another thing was the toilets were a 10-minute walk away. Ten minutes there. You could drive the U. That was still about five minutes. Five minutes there to drive, five minutes there back. So if you needed to go to the toilet, which I'm telling you, as opposed to menopausal woman, you need to go to the toilet. You need to go. But like that's tw at least 20 minutes gone, and that was definitely frowned on. Like, I was I was never said, Oh, don't go to the toilet. In fact, people would say, Oh, you don't have to tell us you're going. But then you would hear stories of the last person who used to work there before me, used to have two long toilet breaks, and like it was really tut-tuttered about. So you're there in physical pain, holding your bladder, working under pressure because going to the loo feels like a problem. You're having one 15-minute break per shift, and you're getting paid under minimum wage legally. Look, it's not uh my most of the people uh half of the people I worked with were lovely. Um I really liked my boss. There was uh when I first started, there was another girl there who was really great. Um, but there were also a couple who worked there, and they were a couple, they were a married couple, who were emotionally horrendous. Like all they could do was complain about my boss and the farm, and that I wasn't cleaning properly and I wasn't fast enough, and you know, I remember once I was trying to get a chook that had got stuck in the next nesting box out of the nesting box, and I asked this other woman for help, and she said we don't have time for that, and I couldn't get this chook out on my own, and I didn't know what to do. So I in the end I told my boss, I don't I don't know if he went back and got her, I'm not sure. But like those sort of things really traumatised me. Um, you know, and then kind of towards the end, there was the day that a colleague said he was going to bring a gun to work the next day. And this was during culling, so when commercial chooks reach about 80 weeks old, um they're gassed because they're seen as eating too much food and not producing enough eggs. And after they're gassed, they're put into you're driven out and put into a pit. So you take the dead birds out there. Um, and one day I went out there because so you take the dead birds that have been gassed out there 80 weeks, but also every afternoon you take the dead birds out that you've picked up in the sheds, um, and you put them in the pit. And so I went out there in the afternoon of a day that some of the birds were gassed, and some of them were still alive, like they'd kind of risen from the dead, like phook phoenix chucks, and it made me so happy to see them. And I'm like, look, I had a big talk to them. I look, you'll probably get eaten by a fox, but if you stick together, that's your best bet. There is a farmhouse over there, they might need some new chickens. Like, we had a big talk to them. Like, oh my god, they've made it, yay! And when I went back um to do the paperwork, I mentioned it to this colleague that there were these chooks working out there and how uh alive out there still, and he said, I'll bring a gun to work tomorrow, then. Look, and that really shocked me because one, he was an ambulance, volunteer ambulance worker. They, I presume, have to go through really strict training about workplace safety and know that you can't just casually mention you're bringing a gun to work. Like it's a that's an unlawful statement in Australia. Um, and to get a gun license in Australia, you have to say that you understand that you cannot bring a gun to work. Unless, unless, of course, I mean it would be different for the guy that was the farm manager, he lived on the farm if he had a gun license. That's different. But for someone who's so this guy was known to be aggressive. I'd he was aggressive, not he was never aggressive towards well, he threatened me once, um, but he spoke in an aggressive way about how his brothers were in jail and part of a you know outlaw motorcycle gang enforcement group of people, and talked a lot about that and talked very negatively and aggressively about my boss and the owner of the farm and and also like quite aggressively about um some of the patients he helped as a volunteer Ambo. And so when that sort of person says, I'm gonna bring a gun to work, like I considered him unstable because I'd seen him go off about nothing, in my opinion, like about someone not cleaning a shed properly. I'd seen him really go off about that, and so when that sort of person casually mentions they're gonna bring a gun to work, like it really did trigger me. I spent a lot of time wondering about what to do about it because again, I didn't want to be seen as that hysterical woman. In the end, the next day I told my boss about it, and he didn't seem that fussed, and then I told the owner of the property when I saw him next, which happened to be the next day, and he sort of was a little bit more oh wait, he should know not to do that, that's problematic. Um, but nothing I don't I don't know what got done, and I left shortly after that because there were quite a few other safety things um that were becoming obvious. My shoulder was playing up a lot, it was getting towards summer, there was no air conditioning, yeah. I didn't know how my body was gonna handle it. So oof. So you're doing that type of work in that environment, that level of physical labour, that level of emotional labour, and there was quite a few unsafe things about the job, and you're being paid less than minimum wage. And the reason, the reason is because of a law from the 1930s, and so at that time there was kind of a lot of change in um working conditions, and the idea was that oh well, because farms run 24-7, animals never stop, we can't apply the normal wage rules, right? So you can shut a cafe, but you can't shut a farm. That was the thinking. And so, because of the power of the Liberal Party and the National Party at that time, they just made an exception. And nearly a hundred years later, we were all just sticking to that. I don't care which political party you vote for, both sides talk about minimum wage increases. Both sides. To talk about fairness and all of that stuff. What is the point of a minimum wage if it's not actually a minimum? All it is is branding. All it is is this bullshit about a minimum. Every time I hear about the minimum wage, that is a kick to my guts, you know, and the guts of everyone who comes under that pastoral act of not being entitled to a minimum wage or penalty rates. At the job I didn't have any training in safety, I didn't have any training in how to use the machines. I didn't have any training in how to clean the sheds. I didn't have any training in how to care for the birds. Quite a lot of um, there were quite a lot of safety guards missing in the sheds. Um, the floors were slippery. Often there were insects, like bug infestations in the shed. There was a maggot infestation once that I kind of dealt with and but that was just, I don't know, I mentioned it, but nothing seemed to get done about it. I often got criticized for not cleaning properly, for not being fast enough. Um, you know, criticism for not doing things properly that no one ever showed me how to do. Oh, we got these new really good machines from China. Um, and these really cool Chinese people came over to install it. Just I introduced because I only worked two or three days a week, they'd been there for about three days when they came, so I introduced myself and I learned their names. Now that you need to remember, they'd also been there about six months before the machines were installed to install like a test machine. The same people had been. I was the first person who got to know their names. The woman that I told you about that I worked with in front of them said to me that she wasn't going to use the bathroom if they were using it. Like it was just fucking horrendous stuff. Um, so these new machines got installed, and the instructions were all in Chinese. On like you know how you have safety like warning buttons and stuff like this, like what to do in case of an emergency. All of that was in Chinese. There were no safety locks, like dead, yeah, get this kind of dead switch that's meant kill switch that's meant to be um installed. So if you're washing the machine, you can put the kill switch on and nobody else can turn it on. Because it's a big machine, you can't always see when other people are around. If someone else came into the shed, none of those were installed. So it was an unsafe place, in my opinion, it was an unsafe place to work, and also I was really bad at the job, I was slow. Um, I liked to talk to the chickens. I was really pedantic about um grading the eggs. Um, yeah, like I was really particular about, I thought I was particular about cleaning, so that meant meant I was slow there too. I was really concerned about the bird's health, um, and that that became something that I knew people didn't want me to talk about. So I was never going to win an Olympic medal for being the best egg farm worker in the world. Um, but like I was also unsupported. So just know that when you hear politicians and other people and media people talk about and union people talk about the minimum wage, just know there are people in Australia working eight-hour days with one 15-minute break in physically brutal jobs with no penalty rates, no overtime, being paid less than the minimum wage. So no, there isn't a universal minimum wage in Australia. There's a story about one that we're sold. It's like a lot of stories we tell ourselves. It sounds a whole lot better than the reality. Oh, a little fun fact I'm gonna sign off with um is if you buy a free range edge in the if you buy free range eggs in the supermarket, it is very likely they've only been outside once per fortnight for the duration of their 80-week life because that is the minimum standard once per fortnight. So when I buy eggs, I like to buy them at a farmer's market and ask the farmer. Um, if you see branding or marketing that's pasteurized, normally what that means is that the chooks are free to roam in a pasture. Um, and I really want to know that. I want to know that the chooks are outside, are free to do dust baths and hang out and enjoy the sun. Chooks love the sun. I'd often come across one that was lying on its back that I thought was dead, but was actually just getting a bit of sun. They're fucking hilarious. So, yeah, if you're buying free-range eggs, do not pay a premium price for basically what's a barn laid a barn laid product. If you're paying $11 or $12 a carton, you really want to know that those chooks have been outside in the sun and they're able to dust bathe and have a lot of pasture to run around in, and that they're not stressed. Because I'm telling you, it is very easy to get that yolk to look yellow by just the water's fed. It doesn't mean it's quote unquote healthier for you. I'm Catherine Redden, and this is the C word. Thanks for listening. Bye.