The pickers were paid illegal hourly pay rates while employed under the controversial 417 working holiday visa scheme on a farm in Murchison, near Shepparton, over a period of five months last year.
An investigation by the national workplace watchdog, the Fair Work Ombudsman, has revealed three Chinese nationals were owed about $9800, an average of $3266 each. The company has since agreed to repay the workers what they are owed.
Fair Work Ombudsman Natalie James.
The new evidence of 417 visa program violations comes as one of Victoria's biggest vegetable producers, Covino Farms, faces serious allegations of ripping off more than 100 migrant labour-hire workers in Gippsland.
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Covino Farms has since had funding suspended by the Victorian government in light of the claims. The salad and vegetable company, which supplies KFC, Red Rooster and Subway, said it did not condone worker exploitation and had recently terminated the last of its agreements with labour hire businesses that use migrant workers.
In other allegations, uncovered by the ABC Four Corners program, migrants working on farms interstate have been paid less than $4 an hour and endured slave-like conditions such as being forced to sleep in dog beds.
Many of the details, which centre on the 417 visa that allows migrants to travel and work for up to six months at a time, have been referred to a wide-ranging Senate inquiry into foreign worker exploitation.
Fair Work Ombudsman Natalie James said the Murchison investigation comes after a spate of recent incidents in the Goulburn Murray region of employers short-changing workers and being forced into expensive back-payments.
She said employers in the region had been required to reimburse about $70,000 following recent workplace inquiries
