Casual workers paying to keep their jobs — opaque kickbacks on day rates

To keep his job, a construction-site worker had to hand several hundred dollars a day out of his wage to the foreman — adding up to a five-figure sum taken from him over five months. Grassroots labourers point out that such head fees and kickbacks have long existed in casual hiring on construction sites, cleaning and pool duty, with the line between a legal agency administrative fee and an illegal demand for bribes extremely blurred, and workers forced to comply because 'not paying means losing the job'.

From what the trade discusses, some sub-contractors operate by reporting inflated wages and then taking a cut, and even when workers know they are losing out they can hardly bargain or report it — otherwise they will not even receive the basic day rate. The construction and grassroots casual market's layers of sub-contracting, wages paid through the sub-contractor and the lack of transparent hiring and pay channels allow the kickback culture to fester long term.

Overall, hiring and pay transparency for grassroots manual labour has long been inadequate, and an open day-rate and a properly formalised casual-matching mechanism have yet to take shape.