George Calombaris, chef, restaurateur and recently departed MasterChef judge, has emerged as the poster boy for wage theft in the hospitality industry after it was revealed in July that his business, MAdE Establishment group, underpaid more than 500 former and current staff $7.8 million.

Calombaris is not the only employer to be caught out. A Fairfax investigation revealed that the Rockpool Dining Group, a private equity-owned restaurant empire fronted by celebrity chef Neil Perry, underpaid its staff $1.6 million in the 2017-18 financial year. Bistro Guillaume at Crown Melbourne, Vue Group and Teage Ezard-owned eateries Ezard and Gingerboy have also been accused of underpayment. Several fast-food franchises have also been embroiled in underpayment scandals, including Muffin Break, Domino's Pizza, and Retail Food Group, the parent company of Donut King and Crust Pizza.

While it might be making headlines, this isn't news to me. In the decade I spent working in hospitality, my employers very rarely paid me anything approximating the award wage. I was once offered $7 an hour for a ten-hour split shift by a Wollongong restaurant owner — but only after I'd completed a three-month training period paid at $5 an hour.

Adam Liaw, a cook, writer and television presenter who became a household name when he won MasterChef Australia in 2010, told of a similar experience when he appeared on Q&A recently. Liaw acknowledged the widespread nature of underpayment in the hospitality industry, which he attributed to the complexity of the award system.

However, in my experience, underpayment was simply part of the business model. If you asked for a higher rate for weekend shifts, you'd likely find your hours cut — the mentality was take it or leave it. There was always another uni student ready to take your place if you spoke out.

Many employers accused of wage theft use the defence that it was 'accidental' — but it's difficult to argue underpayment was unintentional when, as in the case of Rockpool Dining Group, emails show that management instructed employees to log incorrect hours. At Bistro Guillaume, staff often worked 70 hours a week but were paid for just 38 hours. This type of underpayment is clearly not a simple back-office error.

'This is an industry-wide problem and it needs an industry-wide response,' said Natalie James, former Fair Work ombudsman, when a one-off blitz in 2018 by Fair Work in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney revealed an underpayment bill of $472,000.

"We're much less tolerant when it is staff stealing from employers."

It's no coincidence that many of these workers are from overseas: international students and temporary visa holders who are more vulnerable to exploitation than Australian-born staff. In 2018, I spoke to Alejandro, a UTS student from Chile who was paid $18 an hour at a restaurant in Enmore, for a story published at SBS Voices. He told me he'd often finish work at 1am but his boss, who was also verbally abusive, refused to pay him for hours worked outside of the rostered 6pm to 11pm shift.

A UNSW report published in 2017, Wage Theft in Australia: Findings of the National Temporary Migrant Work Survey, found that 43 per cent of international students surveyed earned $15 an hour or less. The study's authors found that two in five participants reported that their lowest paid job was in food services as waiters, kitchen hands or food servers.

'Wage theft seems to have become accepted as a fact of life, maybe even a necessity, in certain sectors and workplaces,' write UTS academics Sarah Kaine and Emmanuel Josserand in The Conversation. 'As a result, employers have developed a sense of impunity, while workers have become resigned to underpayment as unavoidable. Cultural acceptance translates into weak enforcement rules. Wage theft is not considered a criminal offence, in the same way as stealing money from a company.'

It's true that we're much less tolerant when it is staff stealing from employers. In one recent case, a judge handed a six-year jail sentence to a Perth woman who took $1.2 million from her employer over seven years. In another case, a Brisbane woman was sentenced to five years in prison for stealing $340,000 from her employers. In this context, is a $200,000 fine (or 'contrition fee'), like the one levelled at Calombaris, reasonable punishment for an $8 million theft?

Yes, hospitality has small margins, but it isn't the workers who should have to shoulder the financial burden on behalf of business owners. In our society, obeying the law is not optional. There aren't many crimes where the perpetrators can plead 'I didn't mean it' and get away with it, which is why business owners should face stiff penalties for underpaying workers.

Nicola Heath is a freelance journalist who writes about the workplace, social affairs, sustainability, and the arts and entertainment. She tweets at @nicoheath.

Main image: George Calombaris at the 58th Annual Logie Awards at Crown Palladium in Melbourne on 8 May 2016. Credit: Scott Barbour / Getty