Federal Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese presented the report on Friday alongside Chinese worker Wang Xueliang and Unions NSW secretary Mark Morey.

“This isn't the Australian way. We need to do much, much better and we need to address this now,” Mr Albanese said.

The report, based on a survey of over 1,000 job ads for entry level farm work and interviews with workers revealed rampant exploitation and mistreatment of workers.

It found workers were paid wages below the minimum, forced to pay high prices for substandard housing, and in some cases subjected to racial and sexual abuse.

“Food-producing workers are treated like slaves,” said Mr Wang, a migrant farm worker from Inner Mongolia in China.

He said he had worked on many farms around Australia in the last three years, picking tomatoes, grapes, oranges, blueberries and other crops.

One farm on the NSW north coast where Mr Wang worked paid him only $8 an hour and expected him to work 12 hour days without weekends, he said.

Mr Wang said at many of the farms he’s worked for, large chunks of his income went towards paying rent to the employer and he was frequently housed with other workers.

“The number of toilets was seriously insufficient, we were not allowed to rest, and vegetables were often contaminated by human excrement,” he said through a translator.

The report, produced by Unions NSW, found it wasn’t unusual for workers to be paid under $2 an hour for cropping.

A woman identified by the pseudonym “Fran” said she was abused by her boss for her Argentinian heritage.

“I heard him making negative comments about South Americans, he basically sees them as a plague. My boss and his friend shared the same passion to hate the people of our beloved South America,” she said in the report.

Mr Albanese said employers need to do their part to ensure exploitation doesn’t occur, especially if they want Australians to pick up the farm-hand positions left vacant after migrants and backpackers were shut out of the country due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“It is not surprising that Australians don't want to work for $2 an hour,” he said.

He also called on the government to do its part.

“We do need to address the need to make sure that our agricultural produce is able to be picked, that our farms are allowed to operate. But we need to do it in a way (so) that we can be proud of the product we produce, because there are many farmers out there, overwhelmingly, who are doing the right thing,” he said.

“And if you allow exploitation to occur, you are putting them at a competitive disadvantage by doing the right thing.”