Employment Equality Law

On 29 March 2023 Westjustice formally launched its Employment Equality Law Service (EELS), funded through the National Legal Assistance Partnership as part of the implementation of recommendation 53 of the AHRC’s Respect@Work Report. We provide legal information, education, advice and casework assistance to people who live, study or work in the Western suburbs of Melbourne and who have experienced sexual harassment and/or discrimination.

It is well established that sexual harassment is “an unacceptable feature of Australian workplaces”, with one in three workers experiencing sexual harassment in the last five years according to the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Fifth National Survey on Sexual Harassment in Australian Workplaces (November 2022).  We also know that migrant and refugee women are more likely to experience sexual harassment at work, with ANROWS research finding 46% of respondents had experienced sexual harassment in the last five years (2023).

Sexual harassment is a significant issue for the communities in the Western Suburbs but is likely to go unreported and unresolved without legal information and advice. Workers often have a limited understanding of what conduct constitutes unlawful sexual harassment and discrimination, and do not know their legal options when they experience this behaviour. Moreover, they do not feel empowered to speak up for themselves often because of precarious work arrangements or power relationships.

The EELS now forms an integral part of the Employment and Equality Law Program’s vision for decent, safe and fair work for all. The EELS aims to:

• Reduce and prevent experiences of discrimination and inequity experienced by women and culturally and racially marginalised groups
• Improve our community’s knowledge of what is unlawful conduct at work and their workplace rights if they experience that conduct by their employer or another worker
• Enhance our community’s ability to identify situations in which they are subject to discrimination and sexual harassment, and
• Empower clients by increasing their ability to self-advocate or find assistance if they experience sexual harassment or discrimination.

Our lawyers:

• Provide high-quality, culturally appropriate, free legal advice, information, casework and assistance in the areas of workplace sexual harassment and discrimination
• Target our legal services towards workers experiencing disadvantage who would otherwise be unable to enforce their workplace rights or access legal help, such as refugees, newly arrived migrants, people experiencing economic injustice, and young people, particularly through outreach and community partnerships.
• Ensure workers can access complementary legal services such as victims of crime assistance, where appropriate, or identification and assistance with other employment law issues.
• Identify gaps in the law that prevent victims from seeking assistance or otherwise pursuing a remedy, and undertake systemic impact work in these areas to advocate for reform

We work collaboratively with other providers of workplace sexual harassment and discrimination services to contribute to our community of practice and consistent service delivery and we evaluate and update our services annually.

See our Snapshot report on Year 1 of our EELS here.

Systemic advocacy

Our focus for systemic advocacy in the EELS is on improving access to justice for our communities, including enhancing protections for workers who are culturally and racially marginalised, or who are experiencing family violence. You can see our submissions on updating the Fair Work Act 2009 to strengthen protections against discrimination; on the National Strategy to Achieve Gender Equality; and a submission into an appropriate costs model for the Commonwealth anti-discrimination laws on our publications page here.

In our first year of operation, we found that race discrimination was the number one issue that clients were seeking our assistance for, including race discrimination that centred around hostile workplaces. The EELS will focus our systemic advocacy efforts on racially hostile workplaces in our second year of operation.

We also identified that many clients who were victim/survivors of family violence were reluctant to bring a claim or seek assistance for employment law issues while they still had family violence legal issues on foot and did not feel safe. One area for reform we are pursuing is more easy access to closed files and deidentification of applicant information in the Fair Work Commission, to ensure their safety is preserved and their personal circumstances are kept confidential and not published in decisions.

Equality Law capability research

In our first year of operating, we also identified four specific multicultural communities who were not accessing our service in the way other community groups were. These four multicultural communities are the Vietnamese, Afghan, Indian and South Sudanese communities. This was despite those communities comprising a significant proportion of our catchment area in the Western suburbs and meeting our service eligibility criteria.

To address this issue in service delivery, we successfully obtained a Victorian Law Foundation (VLF) Grant to examine the legal capability of these identified culturally and linguistically diverse communities.

The research we are undertaking in 2024 in partnership with Monash University and Human Rights Education Associates will seek to better understand the communities':

• knowledge of and ability to access information about work rights and complaints processes
• ability to identify legal issues that can be resolved with advice and assistance from a lawyer
• legal service accessibility needs, including any cultural safety requirements or barriers to accessing services.

The project also aims to understand the levels of confidence and attitudes in these communities towards resolving those legal issues, and ultimately improve access to justice in relation to exploitation, racism and gender-based violence in the workplace. 

Our research will have two parts: an anonymous survey for members of the community (regardless of whether they have used our services or sought advice about workplace issues in the past); and focus groups so individuals can speak to the researchers directly about the issues raised in the survey.

We will publicly report on our findings from the VLF Grant research and will use these findings to review our services so that we can make them more accessible to these communities.