This is utter and complete bilge and is typical of the lousy intellectual standards that now dominate The Australian in general and its Focus section in particular. Even the business section is not immune to this nonsense. For workers to be underpaid they would have to receive less than the value of their marginal product. But this, Ms Manne, would create a labour shortage which would force firms to drive up real wages. Because this would make companies more money.
Unpaid overtime is another myth.
More importantly, over 70 per cent of 'unpaid overtime' is worked by those in managerial and professional positions, which has invariably been the case anyway. This nonsense brought us right back to McDonald's where, she informs us, consumers do a lot of queuing and unpaid labour like removing their own rubbish, etc. That making it too expensive to hire more young people to do this additional work was evidently too difficult for her to figure out. But then perhaps they don't have Ms Manne's income. That they go to McDonald's clearly indicates that the value of the hamburgers and chips more than compensate for the queuing and so-called unpaid labour.