Fighting to get paid in the Australian hospitality industry
“Don’t expect to get every dollar and cent you're owed back,” the woman from the Fair Work Ombudsman cautioned in a tone that was friendly, but also suggested she had dispensed this piece of advice more times in her career than she cared to count. She then added: “It just makes the process easier if you can work out a reasonable figure you’d be happy accepting.” This struck twenty-five-year-old Kim Morris from Sydney, as odd: Why shouldn’t you get every dollar and cent back that you're owed?
Morris was about to find out; she was entering the belly of the beast: the Fair Work Ombudsman’s process for recovering underpayment of wages; a process many young Australians have been forced to turn to, particularly in the hospitality and retail industries where the incidence of employers not paying the award wage, penalty rates or correct entitlements, is rife.
Morris has worked in hospitality for over eight years, only leaving briefly to work in finance before realising that hospitality was her calling. “People can’t understand it, because I have an economics degree and they think I’m wasting my life," she says. "But I’d rather manage a café than sit at a desk all day.” Having managed cafés and bars both here and overseas, Morris seems like the last person you’d expect to wind up earning below the minimum wage, and she agrees: “It was pretty stupid, but also pretty typical,” she says. “I went overseas and pretty much got into debt up to my eyeballs, like everyone else our age.”
Back in Australia, Morris did the first thing any other Gen Y would do: took the first job she could find. “OK,” Morris laughs. “I did the second thing any other Gen Y would do. Most people I know would get their parents to bail them out.” But it wasn’t until she received her first week’s pay that Morris realised she wasn’t being paid the award wage. “My fault, I didn’t ask,” she says. “But it’s Australia. You just take it for granted that you’ll be paid properly.”
When Morris confronted her employer and asked why she was only being paid $10 an hour when the award wage was around the $18 mark, plus loadings and penalty rates, she says he told her that the job she did was only worth $10 an hour. “Clearly, he was a piece of work,” Morris says. “But $10 an hour. I earned more than that working in the US, and I got tips.”
More than 1.7 million Australian workers are employed in the hospitality and retail industries, making them Australia’s largest industries of employment, but hospitality and retail employees are also among this country’s most poorly paid workers. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the average hospitality or retail worker earns around $42,000 a year, which is about 22 percent more than the minimum wage, but also around 31 percent less than the average Australian income of $61,000; in the United States, the average American hospitality worker earns the minimum wage: $21,170, which is 62 percent less than the average American income.
By comparison, then, it seems Australian hospitality workers are better off than their American counterparts, except that the average single adult under the age of 35 spends about $869 per week on living expenses—that’s $45,188 every year. In the United States, meanwhile, a single hospitality worker earning the minimum wage is $2,470 shy of affording their $23,640 living expenses every year, and as a result hospitality and retail workers across the country went on strike three times between November 2012 and August this year, protesting for the minimum wage to be increased. The wage they're requesting: $15 an hour, similar to that of Australians.
Startlingly, what these figures reveal is that an Australian hospitality or retail worker is no better off than a worker in America—in fact, each year they're $718 worse off living in Australia. While it may be true that Australia has one of the highest minimum wages of any OECD nation, it’s far outweighed by Australia’s high cost of living.
The question, then, is not whether Kim Morris’s job was worth the award wage, but whether she deserved the dignity of living above the poverty line, which The Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research estimates is $489.23 per week for a single person, or $12.37 per hour. It appears, Morris’s employer, along with the many other employers who don’t pay their staff the award wage, mustn’t think so; according to data obtained from the Fair Work Ombudsman, the hospitality and retail industries are among the most complained about, particularly among young workers.
Last year more than 17 percent of complaints made by workers aged between 18 and 25 were made against employers within the hospitality industry; for retail that figure is 9 percent. While in the three financial years to 2012/13 the complaints against the retail industry have decreased by 12 percent, the complaints made by hospitality workers have increased by 17 percent. As a result, the Ombudsman is a conducting an audit of 1,500 randomly selected cafés, restaurants and caterers across the country.
But the Ombudsman’s data only reveals the number of workers who have lodged complaints; it doesn’t account for the many people who have been underpaid or still are being underpaid, because the system requires individuals to report their employers—a process that involves full disclosure of the complaint and the complainant to the employer. “You can’t make an anonymous complaint,” Morris says. “Well you can, but even the people at the Ombudsman concede it doesn’t work.”
TheVine spoke to several hospitality and retail workers for this story, and each confirmed they had been underpaid by their previous or current employers, but hadn’t made a complaint to the Fair Work Ombudsman. “I can’t tell you how many places I’ve worked at where they’ve paid $15 an hour, that’s it; no penalty rates, nothing,” says James Zamboulis, a twenty-six-year-old barista and kitchen-hand from Sydney. “I had thought about complaining to the Ombudsman, but it’s too much of a hassle.”
Twenty-three-year-old retail employee, Caris Walsh, who was also underpaid by her last employer, says small businesses that don’t want to pay their staff the award wage are doing themselves a disservice. “They complain they can’t get good staff, but why would someone work for five or ten dollars-an-hour less than what they can get at a big chain like Myer?”
Walsh, like Kim Morris, also made a complaint to the Fair Work Ombudsman but agrees with Zamboulis’ assessment: it’s a hassle. “The whole process itself is pretty time-consuming,” she says. “I think a lot of people my age wouldn’t bother; they’d just put it down to a bad experience and move on.” For Walsh, the main reason she continued with the process was based on principle. “Everyone I worked with whinged about being underpaid, but they kept working there, and then even when they left they never said anything. That’s what they [her employer] counted on; that no one would do anything about it.”
Even though Kim Morris had kept a record of every shift she had worked, copies of signed rosters, and bank statements showing what she had been paid, she still had to negotiate a ‘reasonable’ settlement with her employer. “To me, reasonable is what I was owed, period,” Morris says now. “But holding out for every last dollar and cent, that takes time; and the way the system works, the volume of complaints they must get, they don’t have time for that.”
Morris did eventually receive a settlement from her employer that was close to the amount she was owed, but she says the process was like a game of poker. “It went back-and-forth, back-and-forth, until eventually I said ‘lets go to mediation, then’ and that’s when he backed down,” Morris says. “He was trying to call my bluff; he didn’t believe I could prove what I was owed, but at the same time he didn’t want the Ombudsman going over his records with a fine-tooth comb.”
Morris attributes her success to knowing her rights and “my kick-ass spreadsheet!” but wonders how many other younger people are aware of what they're entitled to, and feel comfortable going after what they're owed. “I was the only person who worked at that place to make a complaint,” Morris says. “The rest, they just accepted being treated with contempt because they thought ‘oh I only work in a café’, but how many cafés in Australia are there?”
Quite a few, and they all turn a tidy profit, too. The last time the Australian Bureau of Statistics published a data set on the hospitality industry was in 2008, when it found that Australian cafés, restaurants and caterers generated $13.7 billion in revenue, and contributed to 0.4 percent of Australia’s gross domestic product. Of that $13.7 billion an accumulative $2.9 billion was spent on wages and just as much again on food.
At the café Morris now manages in an inner city suburb of Sydney, Morris finishes the last of her latte and gestures in the direction of a lady sitting at the table next to us, who along with her friend, is emptying the contents of her purse onto the table. “How much should I tip?” the lady asks, to which her friend replies: “I never tip. They're paid enough.” Morris smiles, whisks our coffee cups away and disappears inside, back to work.
Source: thevine.com.au - 30 September 2013
