Three years ago, my wages were stolen. I worked for $15 an hour with no penalty rates in a local restaurant. I can still smell the sweat and food scraps stuck to my clothes, hear the screaming from the hot kitchen and feel the sinking disappointment when opening my weekly envelope of cash, poorly hidden beneath the register. “They must have made a mistake,” I thought at first. But it was no mistake.
My bosses were cordially duplicitous. They offered staff free pizza, as if this compensated more than halving our weekend wages. They were mostly friendly and light-hearted, as if this excused forgoing breaks and superannuation. Their image as benevolent “regular mums and dads” slowly crumbled as precarity, trying conditions and poor recompense left a sour taste in my mouth.
Finally, the public is seeing this darker side of hospitality. Recent wage theft allegations against popular Melbourne eateries Barry, Vue de Monde, Chin Chin and the Degani chain, as well as celebrity chefs George Calombaris and Darren Purchese, have leant high-profile names to a previously hidden problem. And these businesses aren’t merely “bad apples” — according to the Fair Work Ombudsman, 48% of Australian hospitality businesses do not comply with industrial laws.
How did businesses get away with it for so long? It’s partly because the dispersed nature of the industry makes unionising difficult. Blood ties and friendships between employers and employees pacify agitation. A weak industrial umpire is also failing to adequately enforce existing laws — the most recent of which are already antiquated and need changing, as unions demand. But I think something culturally specific is also at play.
Instagram foodie culture masks the problem
High-end hospitality has been exceptionally adept at cultivating a unique mythology in the social media era, which obscures its exploitative tendencies. These businesses are visual pastiches meticulously curated for Instagram popularity. Tattooed waiters in denim overalls. Lush indoor greenery. Tossed American ‘slaw and pulled pork on a rustic cheeseboard. Pierre Bourdieu would have a field day. Finally, taste arbiters such as Broadsheet reward such venues with powerful endorsements, eliciting a level of fandom often reserved for musicians and film stars.
Cosmopolitan virtue-signalling is pervasive. Foreign cultural influences are frequently celebrated in venues’ interior design and menus. KeepCups are encouraged. During the marriage equality postal survey, many cafes in Yes-voting suburbs adorned their window with signs saying, “This small business is big enough to support same-sex marriage”. Ironically, these posters were sourced from Victorian Trades Hall, which is now demanding employers face jail-time for wage theft.
As anyone who has smirked at a fellow customer standing on their chair to snap the perfect lunch pic knows, the more seemingly effortless the final image, the more arduously constructed it likely was.
Yet few questioned this rosy image. Even my unionist friends, well accustomed to shoddy workplace behaviour, were surprised when Barry was picketed. We failed to see beyond the abundant indoor plants and funky furniture to the young waitstaff and dish-hands toiling through arduous shifts for paltry sums. It should have been obvious. Hell, I’d experienced it myself. Yet somehow, between bites of kale, we swallowed corporate posturing toward young consumers, while the same corporations stole from young workers.
A reckoning for consumers?
By increasingly defining ourselves through conspicuous consumption, millennial subcultures have invited accusations of complicity. Yet, while we breathe life into “the system”, we also challenge it.
The Australian columnist Bernard Salt’s assertion, for example, that young people could more easily own a house if they didn’t spend so much on smashed avocado prompted a spirited defence of young peoples’ right to purchase things that bring them joy. As baby boomers scolded youth for frivolity, eating a $17 smashed avocado on toast became a subversive act.
Consumption itself isn’t the problem here, and neither is allowing products to in part shape one’s identity. We all find joy and meaning in different kinds of consumption. And it’s hardly surprising that amidst neoliberal austerity, subcultures form around a shared love of indulgences.
Yet the cultural myths which guide our purchases ought to be demystified. Particularly, we must not obscure the material realities of hospitality work. The satisfied customer with a belly full of beef brisket inhabits an ecosystem of grinding, often thankless labour, and systemic inequities that no number of Instagram pics can solve.
Cafe culture must be, in true culinary terms, deconstructed. This lapse in our critical imagination should spur us to confront the contradictions underlying the things we love — not to disavow them, but to reckon with and navigate their complexities. If we fail, we risk licking our lips while the dish-hand starves.
Not enough is said about how these workers are vulnerable and this is a contradiction in a system that depends on your savvy to enforce your own rights. Minimum wage workers are often by default not the most savvy people hence the level of work they work at. Then you add in a lot of youth, migrants and under educated locals of older age.
Telling someone who struggles to read official documents they need to advocate for their own wages and run their own court case is crazy. I’ve worked with people who did not even understand they were not being paid legally. I read one person’s group cert and had to explain to them it was a piece of fraud, and they still did not comprehend what their boss had done to them.
A fair wage system is one where the Government prosecutes more often on people’s behalf. You cannot expect these people to do it themselves, they’re mostly not savvy inner city middle class uni student’s with educated parents and a new found thirst for unionism. They’re vulnerable people who cannot make heads or tails of what is going on and someone needs to intervene on their behalf.
Yes, pay them properly, for Chrissake. We don’t tip wait staff here in Oz because we believe we are in a decently run country where staff do not have to beg for their dues.
Maybe his bosses deducted a fine from his wages every time he used words like “precarity”.
‘Precarity’ is a word in common usage now to describe working conditions and is the correct term to describe the precarious situation many hospitality workers find themselves in. Don’t be such a supercilious nit picker and focus on the very serious issue.
I have never seen that word before.
Thanks for the meaning, I’ll be dropping it into conversation now when the opportunity arises.
Some people seem to think wages are a privilege – “bestowed on employees by benevolent employers” (the “sometimes” intimation re the criminality of such theft, by “business leader” Ming Long? The Dum May 28)?
But wages are money in exchange for “work”.
Short-change or refuse to pay a doctor, dentist, surgeon, mechanic, electrician, plumber, lawyer or anyone else for their work and see what happens?
If you took a TV or a car without paying for it you’d be charged with stealing? What are workers “selling” if not their work?
What’s the difference between other sorts of “theft” and someone stealing someone else’s service for less than an agreed value?
“Caste”?
Yeah, inexcusable, and we should have a regulator who goes and checks these things.
What’s that, we already do, but the government gives them enough money to check 4 cafes a year?
Restaurant businesses are difficult to make money out of – high overheads etc. However as often it is a case of people who can cook well are often the same people who couldn’t run any business, let alone a tough one.
But cafes have no excuse. The margin on a cup of coffee is running around 900%, and well run could afford to pay legitimate wages and make a killing.
Corporate bastardry at the small end to match the corporate bastardry at the big end of town. Thieves!
Agree DB. It took Fair Work four years to get an outcome for cleaners in Melbourne ripped off in 2014.