Hospitality workers dealing with unpaid super

One of the big problems facing workers in the hospitality industry is unpaid super

Most employers don’t pay it.

It’s hard to gauge the extent of the problem because most venues pay their staff in cash.

Hostplus CEO David Elia said his fund was in the process of chasing more than $2 million a month in unpaid contributions from employers and just in the last quarter of 2017, the fund had recovered contributions from more than 3000 employers.

"Small businesses in particular may have some cash flow issues that haven't enabled them to make contributions in that particular period," Mr Elia told the ABC.

"I think we have to call it out. There are some employers out there who simply won't make, or don't make, contributions on behalf of their staff."

Strictly speaking, the Australian Taxation Office has to be keeping an eye on whether employers are paying staff their superannuation.

But the reality is that employees are the ones who are chasing it.

One example is the Brunswick restaurant and bar, Host Dining. One of its employees Chad Parkhill has been trying to get $2,500 in unpaid super after his seven months there.

The restaurant’s owner Nedim Rahmanovic admitted he owed "very small amounts [of superannuation] to a lot" of staff, and "more to others".

"That's something we are trying to get on top of," he told the ABC.

In a statement to the ABC, the co-owner of Collingwood café Alimentari Linda Davis said: "In the past, we paid people in cash while they were trialling with the business, at what we believed were legal trial rates of pay. While this practice may be common in the industry, it is not how we operate today."

And employees say they don’t even notice it’s not there.

"You look at your timesheets, you look at your payslips and the super contribution is there," bartender Jesse Lewis told the ABC. He has less than $100 in his super account after 12 years in the industry.

Leon Getler 18th May 2018