MOST of the 4000 employees in the 7Eleven franchises are working for an illegal rate of $10 per hour and in some cases as little as $5 per hour.

These 7Eleven employees are mostly foreign students who hold work visas which allow them to work 20 hours per week. They are part of a workforce of one million visa holders working in Australia. Most of these visa holders are being ripped off by unscrupulous employers who realise that if these underpaid employees approach the likes of Fair Work Australia or any other relevant government department and complain about working 40 hours for 20 hours' pay, they will then be deported because they have breached their visa working conditions.

In the wash-up, most of these employees hail from countries where there are very poor working conditions and very low rates of pay. Once they have been in Australia over a period of time, they begin to realise that working conditions in Australia are very different to their home countries and that in the case of the 7Eleven franchises, they are being treated unfairly.

Some foreign employees have complained to Fair Work Australia but that body either does mostly not want to hear about the complaints and if they do see fit to act, they are very slow to do so.

One does not have to be a Rhodes Scholar to realise that most visa holder workers who are being exploited are not members of a trade union. They do not have representation.

The Federal Government is spending $80,000,000 on a Royal Commission into Unions in an effort to crucify the union movement. If the Federal Government is so concerned about the unions that they are prepared to spend millions of taxpayer dollars into investigating such, then the question must be asked as to why the government does not spend millions of dollars on a Royal Commission in an effort to investigate a company such as 7Eleven which appears to be making hundreds of millions of dollars from the blatant exploitation of the foreign labour workforce.

VC Druery