4 research outputs found
Expelling Slavery from the Nation: Representations of labour exploitation in Australiaâs supply chain
On 4 May 2015, the Australian national broadcasterâs current affairs programme Four Corners aired an episode titled âSlaving Away: The dirty secrets behind Australiaâs fresh foodâ, that provided revelations of labour exploitation of migrant workers on working holiday visas. The government reacted swiftly to these allegations with an âoperationâ ostensibly designed to stop the exploitation. In reports of Operation Cloudburst, however, there was a shift in the mediaâs definition of the problem: worker exploitation became visa violations and newspapers shortly reported the resulting action taken: the âillegal workersâ in Australiaâs food industry had been arrested. This paper tracks the competing discursive and visual representations of this case that ultimately made questions of labour rights become questions of immigration, making it plausible and acceptable that concern over exploitation of workers should be addressed by deportation of âillegal immigrantsâ. Such discursive slippage is enabled by cultural amnesia over Australiaâs history of exploitation of racialised and migrant labourers, which allows âslaveryâ to be represented as a âforeignâ problem that can be expelled in defence of the purity of the national domestic space