The rights of migrant women in Australia: addressing gendered exploitation in temporary work
Temporary work should be a pathway to dignity and opportunity — not a source of risk. In this important piece, Ananya Doundiyal shows how visa settings, employer dependency, and weak enforcement create conditions where wage theft, coercion, and sexual harassment thrive — especially in feminised sectors like care, cleaning, hospitality, and horticulture.
Grounded in research and lived experience, the article explains why “gender‑neutral” migration rules often produce gendered harms, and highlights promising reforms such as the new Workplace Justice Visa, alongside the need for stronger, accessible protections across all visa categories. It’s a timely call for policy and practice that ensure migrant women can work safely, speak up without fear, and exercise their rights at work.
We’re pleased to share this thoughtful contribution and invite policymakers, employers, unions, and community advocates to act on its practical recommendations — so that essential work is also safe, fair, and dignified for every woman.
Linh* arrived in Sydney full of ambition. Like many migrant women, she came on a temporary visa, eager to build a new life while supporting herself through work. When she asked her employer for extra hours, he suggested they meet to discuss. But instead of a café just down the road, Linh found herself in his car, subjected to unwanted touching and pressured with offers of “support” in exchange for sexual favours. When she refused, his tone turned aggressive, and she realised how unsafe she truly was.
Linh’s experience is not an isolated case. It reflects a broader, systemic reality for migrant women in Australia who are employed in low-paid, insecure industries. A landmark 2017 national report on temporary migrant work revealed systemic underpayment across all categories of temporary workers. Women in feminised professions such as childcare, nannying, cleaning, and aged care were especially vulnerable to wage theft. These are industries built on undervalued and invisible labour, where women are often paid below minimum wage and denied basic entitlements, yet remain silent for fear of losing their visas. These women are the backbone of industries that Australians rely on every day. They clean our hotel rooms, serve our food, care for our elderly, and pick our produce. Yet the conditions under which they work are often hidden in plain sight, made perilous not by accident but by policy design. As US scholar Joan Fitzgerald reminds us, gender functions as an “organising principle, not a simple variable” in shaping migration law and lived experience. Yet, in Australia, detailed qualitative research into women’s specific experiences of migration remains limited. Gender-specific data across visa categories is sparse, and policy debates rarely account for the unique vulnerabilities faced by women.
On paper, much of Australia’s migration law appears “gender neutral.” Visa categories are not explicitly designed around gender. But in practice, the system operates in profoundly gendered ways. For instance, dependent visa-holders are overwhelmingly women, tied to partners or employers who effectively control their status. This dependency creates fertile ground for both workplace exploitation and family violence. Australia’s Family Violence Provisions (FVP) acknowledge this vulnerability in narrow terms. They allow some partner visa holders, overwhelmingly women to remain in Australia if their relationship ends due to family violence. However, the process is deeply onerous as applicants must prove both the genuineness of the relationship and the occurrence of violence, often at high emotional and financial cost. And crucially, these protections apply only to a limited set of visas.
Many of the women on temporary visas do not think their employers are doing enough to protect them from sexual harassment. A significant number of workers across different industries quit their jobs after experiencing sexual harassment because they felt in danger and thought their employer was not doing enough to ensure they were safe at work. According to Unions NSW’s report, an overwhelming majority of survey respondents did not report sexual harassment as the prevalent factors preventing them from reporting were fear of a negative impact on visa status and employer retaliation. Almost seven in ten (67%) workers who experienced sexual harassment in the cleaning industry indicated concerns related to their migration status, followed by 64% in the construction industry, 60% in retail, 58% in horticulture, and 51% in hospitality.
According to the Immigration Advice and Rights Centre (IARC) report, like the Working Holiday Maker visa (subclass 417 and subclass 462), women with a Student visa (subclass 500) are also threatened by their employers with visa cancellation for exceeding the 48-hour per fortnight work limit, which effectively silences these workers and enables widespread exploitation. Additionally, the exploitation of workers under the Pacific Australia Labor Mobility (PALM) scheme has been identified as being at high risk of modern slavery.
These patterns are not random. They reflect structural drivers that make migrant women especially vulnerable to exploitation. Visa restrictions, employer dependency, and a lack of safe reporting mechanisms combine to create a climate where abuse goes unchecked. Australia’s migration system has been repeatedly criticised for entrenching this precariousness. Tied visas, which bind workers to one employer grant extraordinary power to bosses while stripping women of bargaining rights. Even when protections exist on paper, enforcement is weak. The Fair Work Ombudsman remains chronically under-resourced, and penalties for breaches are often so low that some employers treat them as a cost of doing business.
The result is a culture of impunity, where wage theft and harassment are seen as manageable risks by unscrupulous employers, but devastating realities for the women who endure them. Migrant women often find themselves caught in a double bind as they are needed to fill labour shortages in feminised industries like care and cleaning yet denied the basic dignity and protections that should come with that work.
Community organisations have long warned that gender has been neglected in migration policy. While reforms such as the Family Violence Provisions as discussed acknowledge the risks faced by some women, they are narrow in scope and difficult to access. For most temporary migrant women like students, seasonal workers, working holiday makers there are no gender-sensitive protections at all. Instead, their visa conditions become tools of silence, wielded by abusive employers or partners to maintain control. This silence, therefore, carries a social cost far beyond the individual. When women leave jobs after harassment or accept below-award wages because they feel powerless to resist, entire industries are reshaped around exploitation. Honest employers are undercut, labour standards are eroded, and gender inequality is deepened. Australia cannot claim to be serious about women’s rights while relying on the invisible, underpaid, and unsafe labour of migrant women to keep its economy running.
However, there is a positive side as well, where the Human Rights Law Centre has played a central role. For several years, the Human Rights Law Centre has led a coalition of more than 40 unions, civil society organisations, faith-based groups, and migrant rights advocates calling for stronger protections for migrant workers. Together they proposed a suite of reforms, including a guarantee against visa cancellation and a short-term Workplace Justice Visa for exploited workers.
In July 2024, after sustained advocacy and expert advice, the Australian Government listened. It introduced a two-year pilot of world-leading protections designed to prevent migrant worker exploitation. The Workplace Justice Visa now provides the most robust protections for migrant workers of any country. For the first time, workers – regardless of nationality or visa status – can speak up about exploitation without the fear of losing their right to stay in Australia. Human Rights Law Centre is helping workers access these new protections, from delivering information sessions to unions and student groups to providing direct legal support. As one of only a handful of legal centres authorised to certify applications, it is ensuring that those who need protection most can benefit from it.
Thus, addressing these issues that migrant women face daily requires more than incremental reforms. A genuinely equitable system must ensure that protections apply across all visa categories, that women are not silenced by the threat of deportation, and that enforcement bodies have both the mandate and resources to hold exploitative employers accountable. Crucially, it also requires a cultural shift that values the essential work migrant women perform not as supplementary but as central to Australia’s economy and society.
If Australia is to meet its commitments to gender equality and labour rights, migration governance must be reshaped with gender at its core. Only then can the systemic exploitation of migrant women be addressed, and the conditions created for safe, dignified, and fair work.
Content Moderator: Brianna Delahunty