Much of the public and political attention on industrial relations policy making is directed at the construction of rights for workers. Just as important is how those rights operate in practice. Hence, the preceding chapters have focused on the practical application of industrial relations policies, that is, how businesses and workers operationalize rights in the context of institutional settings and power relations. This broader approach to the lived experience of policies, emphasizing not only the construction of standards but also their means of enforcement, recognizes the value of fairness in practice (Befort and Budd, 2009). It recognizes that workplace rights and minimum standards are hollow if businesses do not comply with them and if there are constraints on actors, including workers and the state itself, enforcing them.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of employers’ unlawful underpayment of employees’ remuneration, often referred to rhetorically as ‘wage theft’ (Murphy et al, 2024). Despite workers in Australia having a well-developed range of rights, many workers have been unable to benefit from those rights in practice. That is, their employers have paid them less than they are legally entitled to receive for their work under Australia's wage laws, to the extent that it is estimated to cost employees and the Australian economy ‘billions of dollars every year’ (Australian Government, 2022b).