Australia Just Entrenched Lower Wages for Young Workers
In Australia, workers under 21 years old are paid less for the same jobs. It’s an obvious injustice — and thanks to new laws, now it’s entrenched.
The profitability of Australia’s big retail and fast-food companies relies on the hyperexploitation of child labor through junior rates. (Jeff Greenberg / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
In late March this year, a flurry of headlines declared that junior rates for workers under the age of eighteen had been abolished in Australia. It seemed like a good-news story. The only problem is that it wasn’t true.
Other articles claimed that junior rates for workers between the ages of eighteen and twenty had been abolished. This, sadly, was also untrue.
Almost all workers in Australia under twenty-one years old get paid a percentage of the adult wage. A fifteen-year-old in retail, for example, receives around 45 percent of the adult wage. The same worker at a fast-food outlet will be paid 40 percent of the adult wage.
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