Youth Wages, Discrimination and Exploitation: How we are being cheated

By Kirk

About 75% of high school students over the age of 15 work in part time and casual jobs. But while we are busy enjoying our new found cash, we don’t always realise exactly how badly we are being exploited and ripped off by our bosses.

Young workers make up their own special group within the bigger workforce with 60% of them working in the retail and hospitality industries. Companies like McDonalds, Subway, KFC and Hungry Jacks are built around young, low paid workers, and they rely on young people, to be the ones cooking the burgers, dishing out the soft serve and operating the cash registers. And it’s not just fast food that relies on young workers, but super markets who roster 15 16 and 17 year olds to operate the checkouts at 10 o’clock on a Saturday night, or spend their Sundays putting the soft-drink and the chips on the shelves. Companies and businesses like these also rely on 18, 19 or 20 year old workers to be duty managers and supervisors in these situations, meaning that the majority of the most essential and basic work is done by young workers.

No doubt it is easy to think of many similar jobs that get done by young workers almost exclusively. But it is not the hours or the triviality of the jobs that is the main thing that sets young people apart in the workforce. It is the legal recognition of those under the age of 21 years as ‘youth’ and therefore the right of bosses to pay them less in wages than those who are 21 years of age or older. The Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission have stated that “Employers may lawfully pay a youth wage” or that it is well within the rights of bosses to exploit young workers by paying them less than their older colleagues, based on age.

Young people are being denied their basic human right in the workplace, the right of equal pay for equal work. This right is actually enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Australia signed up too in 1948. It states “Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.”

15 and 16 year old workers at Safeway only receive half of the wage anyone over the age of 21 dose for work such as operating checkouts, cutting fruit and vegies and stacking shelves, all of which is essentially unskilled labor. This fraction of full wages is outrageous, and similarly insulting percentages are faced by workers from 17 years of age to 20 years of age. These outrageous fraction-wages can be found in agreements for Coles and other supermarket workers aswell. At KFC, 15 year old workers can be paid a tiny 40% of full, adult pay, all for the exact same work that anyone who is 21 years or older would do.

Bosses and companies argue that young people don’t have the same skills or don’t work as hard or as fast as older workers, or even that they don’t need as much money as older workers because they don’t need to support families. But all of those arguments are completely wrong and the truth is that bosses are just looking for any excuse to make bigger profits, and are backed by the organs of a capitalist state, such as the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission.

Too say that young people can’t stack shelves, operate cash registers or serve food as fast or as well as older workers just because of their age is a total lie.

It’s said in a manner which suggests that, what the young workers don’t receive for their labour, the older workers do. But this is simply not the case. The raising of youth wages should not, and does not, lead to the lowering of wages for older workers, in the same way that raising the wages of women did not do the same thing.

It would be like saying that if a company had 10 workers, and employed 10 more, that the wages of the previous 10 would be lowered so that the pay is more equal, as if the income of these companies does not vary what so ever.

What the young workers don’t receive goes straight back into the pockets of the bosses, and not into the pockets of their co-workers.

Young people still have to pay the same amount of money as older workers on full wages, for clothes, food and shelter, and due to this, many young people live in poverty even though they have jobs. It is also important to note that the arguments used by bosses in favour of giving young people less than a full wage, are the same as the arguments used by bosses in the past in favor of paying women less than men.

Youth Wages are a major issue for the young people of today and into the future, as they affect the ability of the youth to get a decent start in adult life, wether that is in HECS debt or other studying costs, saving for a car, or just saving to move out of a home.

The concept of ‘Youth Wages’ is totally unfair and illogical and exists only so that companies and bosses can make bigger profits off the backs of young workers.

There exists ways in which we can challenge these laws, together, and be able to struggle for better conditions, better pay and a better world.

We must build from the ground up and not the other way around. Organizing in our workplaces is one of strongest and best means available means to us.

It gives us strength, and it gives us confidence.

We call for young workers to organize and take industrial action to have the outrageous concept of Youth Wages that leads to the impoverishment working youth abolished.