Having worked on major construction projects I have seen alot , one project employed 150 Philippine workers in one hit, they come with their own supervision. After getting to know these guys I found some had know idea what they were doing and their mates would have to cover for them, I ended up getting to know these guys and made friends with some good guys and one supervisor told me he was mowing lawns for resort's before coming here. The problem is the main client pays the contractor for each person recruited , the contractor then employs these guy through a recruitment agent which is a subsidiary and owned by the contractor in the Philippines. So they are doing the reference on themselves to check to make sure they meet the industry experience requirements. The other problem I have is it takes young Australians 4 years to complete a apprenticeship , in the Philippines its 6 months so alot of guy will have multiple trades so a guy can build the scaffold, weld the pipework and then paint the pipework. These guys must be paid Enterprise Bargaining Agreement rates the same as Australians so the way around this is, the guys are employed by the recruitment agent ( which is the contractor ) and the contractor sets up their bank accounts when they arrive so their Australian rate of pay goes into their account then the recruitment agent ( themselves aka the contractor ) charges them a fee for getting them the job and takes it from their account as they signed a contract with them back in the Philippines (these fees are huge in some cases more than 50% of their pay but they are still making good money compared to their home). It's not these guys fault they are only trying to better themselves, its our politicians fault. This is why Australians miss out on jobs and their wages won't go up , why employ Aussies when you can pay yourself to employ people at a cheaper rate. All they have to do is advertise the job and tell the government they can't find the workers (which they knock back saying they don't meet the requirements) and then they can start employing from overseas. This project had about 15000 people and the company I worked for had 2500 people on site ( this is one job site )and not one apprentice (something I tried to push). Cheaper rates and 4 year apprenticeship vs 6 months our kids are missing out.
