Modern slavery statements and supply-chain due diligence for cleaning firms

The Modern Slavery Act 2018 (Cth) is a reporting law for large entities, not a licensing law for night cleaners. Australian entities — and some foreign entities carrying on business here — with consolidated revenue of at least $100 million in a reporting year must give the minister a modern slavery statement describing risks in their operations and supply chains, and the actions they take. Those statements sit on a public register. Cleaning appears in them because a bank, a university, a supermarket or a facilities-management company cannot talk about its labour supply chain without talking about the people who unlock the building after dark.

That is why a three-van firm in Dandenong or Townsville now receives a portal questionnaire with the same heading. You are not the reporting entity. You are the supply chain. Treating the email as spam is how you lose a panel you already won on price.

This sits in WHS and compliance because the host will file your answer next to the insurance certificate, the labour-hire licence and the police-check sample. It sits next to operations because the only due diligence that matters is how people are actually hired, rostered and paid.

What the Act does, and what it does not

The Commonwealth Act requires reporting entities to publish an annual statement covering prescribed matters: structure, operations, supply chains, modern slavery risks, actions (including due diligence and remediation), how effectiveness is assessed, and consultation with any owned entities. The statement is approved at board level and signed. It is not a marketing brochure, though many of them read like one.

It does not, by itself, set a minimum wage. It does not inspect your cleaners’ store. It does not replace the Fair Work Act, the Cleaning Services Award 2020, the Migration Act 1958, state labour-hire licensing, or WHS law. Those are the teeth. The statement is the host’s description of how they use them.

A $100 million consolidated-revenue threshold means most commercial cleaning contractors are not mandatory reporters. A few national contractors and facilities groups are, or sit inside a group that is. If you are in that band, get counsel and write a statement that a director can sign without crossing their fingers. If you are not, do not print a fake “Modern Slavery Statement 2026” with a stock photograph of chained wrists. Hosts can read. So can workers.

Voluntary statements exist. They are useful only if they describe a program you run: who you hire, how you pay, which subcontractors you use, what you do when someone complains. A two-page honest letter beats a ten-page policy copied from a miner.

State residual laws and procurement rules can add questions — New South Wales has had its own modern slavery statute aimed at government procurement — but the questionnaire you are staring at is usually the Commonwealth reporting entity asking you to feed their statement. Answer that question.

Why cleaning is always in the risk column

Commonwealth guidance and a decade of Australian inquiries have treated cleaning, security, horticulture, some food processing and some garment supply as higher-risk labour. The pattern is not exotic. It is:

• night work, split shifts and hours that are easy to under-record
• a workforce that includes recent migrants and people working in a second language
• long subcontract chains (client → FM → head cleaner → labour-hire → “the van”)
• cash extras, unpaid trial shifts, and piece-like expectations on a square-metre rate that cannot fund the Award
• accommodation or transport that the worker is told they must take
• visa conditions that a supervisor quietly exploits (“you’ll lose the hours”)

You do not need a made-up statistic to take that seriously. You need a payroll that matches the roster, and a subcontract you can name.

Wage theft — underpayment of Award entitlements, overtime, penalty rates, broken-shift allowances, travel, and the laundry and first-aid allowances the Cleaning Services Award actually contains — is the ordinary Australian form of this risk. Sham contracting (calling a cleaner a contractor to dodge the Award) is the next. A host who has read a Fair Work Ombudsman cleaning inquiry will not be impressed by a paragraph about distant cocoa farms and silence about last Sunday’s hours.

If you use labour hire, the host will ask whether the provider is licensed in Victoria, Queensland, South Australia or the ACT, whether you checked, and whether you have seen evidence that those workers are paid. See workers compensation and labour hire. If you on-hire your own people, you may be the provider.

The questionnaire is the real instrument for small firms

A typical facilities or university pack asks some version of:

• Who owns you, and do you have overseas operations or labour?
• Do you use subcontractors or labour-hire? Name them.
• How do you verify right to work?
• How do you pay — Award, agreement, frequency, cash?
• What training do workers get on their rights, in what languages?
• What is the grievance path that does not go only through the supervisor who sets the hours?
• Have you had a Fair Work, WHS or labour-hire investigation in the last three years?
• Will you let us audit, and will you flow these questions down one more tier?

Answer with documents you already should have. Company extract. Award classification table. Sample payslip (redacted). Labour-hire licence extracts. Induction outline. The name and number of the person who takes a pay query. A short description of the last time you found an underpayment and what you did — if you have never found one, say how you would look.

Do not tick “we have a robust program” if the program is a PDF nobody has read. Do not list a whistleblower hotline that rings a mobile on silent. Do not claim you audit subcontractors if you have never asked them for a payslip.

Flow-down is the part small firms resent. A reporting entity will say you must impose the same questions on your labour-hire firm and your weekend subcontractor. That is reasonable once. It is not reasonable as a twenty-page portal that a sole trader cannot complete. Push back by offering a shorter pack and a conversation, then still do the conversation. A subcontractor you cannot describe is a subcontractor you should not send to a key-holding site.

Due diligence that is not a poster

Useful due diligence in a cleaning firm is operational:

Hire. Right-to-work check before the first shift. No unpaid “trials” that are just a night’s work. A written offer that names the Award and the classification.

Roster and pay. Hours captured the way people actually work, including the extra wing the supervisor added at 1am. Penalty rates for night and weekend. Broken-shift rules if you break them. Superannuation on the right ordinary-time base. A payslip that a Fair Work inspector could read.

Induction. Not only chemicals and sharps. A plain explanation of how to query pay, in the languages you actually employ. A second channel — an office person, not only the leading hand.

Labour-hire and subcontract. Licensed where required. A written agreement that says they pay the Award, hold workers compensation, and will not further subcontract without you. A sample check, not an annual hope. Retrieval of fobs when their person leaves.

Accommodation and fees. If anyone in your chain is charging workers for a job, a uniform at a fantasy price, or a bed, that is a red flag you do not sit on. Cleaning in Australia still sees this around visa labour. End the arrangement.

Remediation. When you find an underpayment, pay it, tell the worker, and decide whether the host needs to know under the contract. Hiding it until a media letter is how reporting entities end up writing you into next year’s statement as the incident.

None of this requires a consultancy logo. It requires a bookkeeper who is not frightened of the Award, and a supervisor who is not paid to run the site on silence.

What hosts are really trying to avoid

A university or a bank that files a statement and then appears in a wage-theft story about its night cleaners has failed the only effectiveness test the public understands. Their questionnaire is self-protection. You can work with that without becoming their legal department.

Give them a true picture of your chain. Invite a site walk that includes a conversation with a cleaner who is not the leading hand. Show the Award table on the wall if you have one. Show the SDS and the key register at the same time — a host who sees a controlled workplace is less worried about a hidden workforce.

Price the compliance. If a panel wants quarterly statutory declarations, labour-hire licence checks, and an audit right, the tender price has to hold a few hours of office time. A square-metre rate that only works if the Sunday penalty is forgotten will eventually appear in someone else’s modern slavery statement, with your ABN.

Keep the file small and current

A folder — paper or digital — with the ownership, the Award, the labour-hire licences, the last questionnaire you sent, the grievance contact, and the last remediation is enough for most contractors under the threshold. Review it when you add a subcontractor, win a site in a licensed labour-hire state, or change payroll systems.

If you cross the $100 million line, or sit in a group that does, stop treating this as a questionnaire and start treating it as a board paper. Until then, the job is not to sound like a reporting entity. The job is to pay people correctly, know who is in the building, and answer the host without fiction.

Modern slavery law in Australia is, for most cleaning firms, a supply-chain conversation about ordinary wage theft and ordinary labour hire. Do that work and the statement above you will have something true to say. Skip it and no amount of policy language will help when the Fair Work inspector and the client’s procurement team arrive in the same week.