Ombudsman calls out toxic, pressure cooker restaurant environment
The Fair Work Ombudsman has taken restaurants across Melbourne to task as young chefs are being overworked due to the industry’s worker shortage.
Some well-known Victorian restaurants have been found to be flouting fair work rules, including one popular restaurant whose owner told a chef on a working overseas visa that he couldn’t take another job “because I own you”.
This was just one case of extreme bullying among many others.
The Herald Sun has been told that due to staff shortages, under trained chefs are being elevated to senior positions causing toxic “pressure cooker” environments of stress and dysfunction.
South Melbourne fine dining restaurant Lûmé was also accused of creating a toxic workplace. Executive chef Diego Huerta Chabert quit due to the “dark” and “unethical” side of the company he worked for.
“Over the course of my time here I’ve had the privilege of working alongside many talented, good people … however, the negative side of this company is too dark to fade away with the successes that we’ve achieved,” Chabert said.
“It has deeply upset me to witness the unethical behaviour exhibited by the owner towards current staff, suppliers, friends and former colleagues.”
A Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO) spokeswoman said there “persistent high levels of noncompliance”.
This includes pay and conditions infractions: 83 per cent (or 177) of the 213 restaurants, cafes and fast-food outlets audited across Australia in the 2021-22 financial year failed to do the right thing.
Improving compliance is necessary to turn the tide.
Ombudsman Sandra Parker said, “Where employers do not comply, we will take appropriate action to protect employees. A court can order a business to pay penalties in addition to back paying workers.”
President of Australian Institute of Technical Chefs, Sarah Maric, told the Herald Sun that the industry was in crisis due to staff shortages and fast-tracked apprenticeships.
“An apprentice used to spend time with every single person in the brigade … to get an understanding of what happens in each section. That’s been taken away now. So, what we’ve got is a young person who walks out of TAFE with a certificate three or four depending on whether it’s a private RTO or a professional organisation — and the private RTOs are running them through a lot faster, sometimes in as little as four to six months — but they’re being paid as a qualified chef. They are put in a pressure cooker situation and struggling,” she said.
“It’s a tough place to be already, and then they’re pushed up through the ranks more quickly than they should be into administrative roles that they’re nowhere near prepared for … and they’re stressed, overwhelmed, exhausted and in a situation where they’re not coping.”
The days of spending 10 years training and developing staff are long gone.
Restaurant and Catering Australia chief Suresh Manickam said that another problem is that what was once acceptable is now no longer tolerated.
I think we all need to be mindful of those evolutions as they are in terms of cultural norms, behaviours and the like, and call them out (when they are wrong) — but in a way that does not denigrate people — in a positive and helpful way,” Manickham said.
Companies the ombudsman has acted against include:
- Stawell restaurant Lillies and Lattes for allegedly failing to properly pay a cook, who had come from Sri Lanka on a student visa.
- Former Gami Chicken & Beer franchise operators from Southland shopping centre who were accused of underpaying workers including two young people, aged 17 at the time, and a number of visa holders from Vietnam and Korea.
- The Daylesford Hotel Frangos and Cafe Koukla were penalised after 97 staff were allegedly underpaid a total of $320,929. Charges included underpayment of 15 juniors, aged between 15 and 20 at the time, and several visa holders from countries including Nepal, Pakistan and Armenia.
- Former operators of a Degraves Street cafe in Melbourne’s CBD. More than $42,000 in court penalties and back pay for workers was ordered to be paid.
- The former operators of a Melbourne juice and coffee bar and a director kept more than $14,000 in JobKeeper payments instead of paying them to an employee.
- The former franchisee of the Coffee Club outlet at the Westfield Geelong was forced to pay $115,603 in penalties after finding they deliberately underpaid two young workers and falsified records.
Jonathan Jackson, 5th July 2023
