A wave of underpayment cases is forcing employers to confront why migrant workers are exploited and what compliance requires
Another migrant worker underpayment case is before the courts – this time a $93,257 claim against the operators of an IGA supermarket in Narrandera, regional New South Wales, filed by the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO) in July 2026.
The specifics will play out in the Federal Circuit and Family Court. But the case is really just the latest data point in a much bigger, persistent problem: why do migrant workers keep getting underpaid, and what should HR actually be doing differently?
Associate professor Anna Boucher, of the University of Sydney and senior counsel at Fragomen Global Law Firm, has researched labour market breaches across multiple countries and identifies three overlapping drivers. The first is visa dependency itself.
"They're susceptible to being underpaid because they're on visas," Boucher said. "A lot of migrants are on temporary visas, so sometimes those visas can be used to pressure migrants to engage in suboptimal employment by the employer."
The second driver is simple complexity. Boucher said neither employer nor employee is always aware a breach of immigration or employment law has occurred, particularly as legislative change accelerates.
"Because what we're seeing in legal practice is you've got a lot of changes happening to the Fair Work Act and the Migration Act, new forms of intersection, but changes in HR personnel, and they're...
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