“What 7-Eleven is doing is a truly criminal act.” It’s six months since Ehsan Kabir quit his job at a 7-Eleven store in suburban Melbourne. He is working interstate now, and hasn’t been following every development in the enormous scandal over wage rip-offs that engulfed the convenience store chain last year.

So Ehsan is pretty shocked when I tell him that, at the start of May, the giant corporation that owns the brand in Australia sacked veteran regulator Allan Fels and the independent panel that he headed, which had been rectifying back pay issues.

Ehsan is one of more than 15,000 workers – no-one seems to know the exact number – who have been systematically ripped off by 7-Eleven franchisees. Over the past year, the ABC, Fairfax Media, the Fair Work ombudsman, Allan Fels and a Senate inquiry have all documented, in great detail, a widespread system of illegal wages, enforced by violence and threats of deportation. The wage rort has ripped untold millions out of the pay of 7-Eleven workers.

The biggest beneficiary of this fraud, violence and coercion is still at large. In fact, he is one of the hundred richest people in the country.

Russell Withers and his family are the main owners of the 7-Eleven franchise in Australia. The cash flows from 7-Eleven stores underpin a sprawling business and property empire. Withers’ wealth was estimated for the BRW Rich List in June last year at $787 million – an increase of $122 million on the figure in 2014. When the new Rich List came out at the end of May 2016, Withers’ estimated wealth had mushroomed to $1,334 million – an increase of more than $10 million every week over the past year.

For the workers who produce this wealth, of course, it’s a different story.

Ehsan started work in August 2013 as a “trainee” – totally unpaid by the store owner. After a month or so, he was put on a wage of $12 an hour for the 10pm to 7am shift. This flat hourly rate is around half the legal minimum for a night shift in retail, and even further below the legal minimum for weekends and public holidays. Ehsan was later given a pay rise to a flat rate of $15 an hour, mainly working afternoon shifts.

When the mainstream media exposed the story of 7-Eleven’s wage scams last August, things certainly changed – but not all for the better. “The first thing they told us was, not to talk with anyone about the issue”, Ehsan tells me. However, he was able to get compensation for past wage underpayments via the taskforce headed by Fels, totalling some tens of thousands of dollars. And for a brief period, late last year, Ehsan’s boss was actually paying according to the legal minimums. This didn’t last long.

7-Eleven’s franchise model, in which the head office takes around half of the gross profit on goods sold – leaving the individual store owner to pay wages and other expenses out of the rest – ensures that illegally low wages continue. “He was very open with me”, Ehsan explains, referring to his boss. “He said, ‘OK, now if I keep paying these wages, I’ll lose my business.’”

Ehsan is an Australian national. So the franchisee thought that if he cut Ehsan’s wage, there was a fair chance that the authorities would hear about it. So Ehsan’s boss started to cut his hours, giving more shifts to workers in a more vulnerable situation because of their visas, and deliberately finding fault with anything Ehsan did.

So in the end, in the absence of any effective policing from government authorities or any union, the revelations in the media last year have barely changed the scale of worker exploitation. Even the payouts as a result of the Fels tribunal, at $10 million so far, represent only a week’s loot for the Withers family, and are estimated to be only a small fraction of the money owing to ripped off workers.

As Ehsan points out, this isn’t a problem only for 7-Eleven workers. These problems tend to spread. “If this exploitation can happen within these laws and strict framework, anything can go on. If you’ve decided to ignore all the corruption and unfairness, this creates a long term concern for the society. This is going to create more and more exploitation: exploitation leads to more exploitation.”

This is not idle speculation. The construction union reports that some of the scams affecting 7-Eleven workers, such as the cash back scam (where workers are paid the correct amount, but then forced to withdraw cash to give back to their employers), are now appearing on commercial building sites in the heart of Melbourne’s CBD.

There are plenty of lessons from the ongoing 7-Eleven scam for every unionist in the country. That an injury to one worker is an injury to all. That government authorities and the media cannot, by themselves, end even the most blatant exploitation and criminal activity by employers. That change requires workers like Ehsan and many others speaking out. But also that any real remedy requires something more – effective worker organisation, the ingredient so starkly lacking in the 7-Eleven story.