A court has ruled a Canberra school cleaning business that underpaid migrant workers and signed them to agreements they didn't understand breached the Fair Work Act.
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The United Voice union launched a case against Phillips Cleaning Service and its director Angelo Di Dio in the Federal Court on behalf of 22 workers in 2015, alleging in court documents some were owed almost $25,000.
Most of those workers were S'gaw Karen refugees from Thailand and Burma, who spoke little English and spent two decades in refugee camps in Thailand before they were resettled in Australia.
The company, which was contracted to clean 10 public schools in the ACT, has repeatedly denied the allegations.
But the business and Mr Di Dio now face hefty fines after Justice Jayne Jagot found each had breached workplace laws in their treatment of the workers.
One of the cleaners, Htoo Ywai, who came to Australia as a refugee from Thailand and spent more than 20 years in a refugee camp with his family, said he had been confident there would be a positive outcome and workers were happy with the result.
"We have been through a lot together," he said in a statement. "But we never let go of each other, even when things get really hard because we know together, in unity, we can fight for our rights."
Justice Jagot, in a decision on Friday, found the company breached the Fair Work Act when they hadn't paid the employees properly for school holiday work, didn't provide an off-site induction, and didn't pay some employees annual leave loading.
They would also pay workers their annual leave entitlements in December whether they planned to take annual leave or not.
The company and Mr Di Dio failed to take into account the language skills of several workers when they drafted their appointment letters and knowingly made false and misleading statements in those letters about employees' workplace rights.
Justice Jaygot found the company hadn't provided workers with payslips with proper details on them for several periods, saying its approach to the documents was "as haphazard and self-interested as its overall approach to its industrial obligations".
She said Mr Di Dio, who she found was "knowingly concerned" in each of the company's breaches, wasn't a credible witness and took aim at his evidence as "repeatedly self-serving, internally inconsistent and unbelievable".
"He operated PCS as he saw necessary in the sole interests of PCS no matter what might be in the [enterprise] agreement, buttressed in part by an unsubstantiated but strongly held belief that provisions had been included in the agreement without his knowledge".
"No employee was given the opportunity to work in accordance with their legal rights," she said.
Justice Jagot will hear further submissions to determine costs for the workers, as well as penalties against the company and Mr Di Dio, at a later date. She noted "the amount of money involved is not a good measure of the importance of a claim of this kind".
She ordered a copy of the court's decision be forwarded to the ACT Education Directorate director-general, "who should be aware of the issues to which this case has given rise".
The government last year renewed the company's contract while the court case was ongoing. It announced this week cleaning companies looking to work in ACT public schools would face higher scrutiny under a shake-up of how contracts were awarded.
A spokesman for Mr Di Dio, Sam Cassaniti, denied the company had taken advantage of the workers and maintained the union started the court action due to a refusal to enter into a proposed enterprise agreement.
He said they would consider appealing the court's decision.
United Voice ACT branch secretary Lyndal Ryan was "delighted" with the win, congratulating the workers for fighting a two-year legal battle for their entitlements because they "wanted their truth to be told".
