On Monday night, former MasterChef Australia contestant Adam Liaw appeared as a panellist on Q&A where he slammed his former TV mentor George Calombaris for underpaying his staff, arguing there are “no excuses” for restaurants that rip off their workers.
Adam Liaw says prison should be on the table for wage thieves
Responding to a question about the recent scandal involving Calombaris— who was recently slapped with a $200, 000 fine for underpaying his staff— Adam said he believes “jail time should be on the table” for people who commit wage theft”.
“People should be paid the legal wage to which they’re entitled,” said Liaw who won the second season of MasterChef Australia in 2010. “The question came up this week about whether or not [wage theft] should be criminal and to that I would say ‘why not?’ It’s a form of fraud and dishonesty.”
He continued: “Increasing penalties and putting people in prison for doing large-scale systemic wage theft is certainly something that should be on the table.”
“Should some of these chefs be locked up?” guest host Fran Kelly asked.
Liaw went on to share his own experience, revealing he too had been underpaid when starting out in the restaurant industry, earning as little as $5 an hour for his shifts.
“In my case that was $10 an hour and $5 an hour in some cases. But none of that is an excuse for not paying your employees properly.
“I have worked in an awful lot of restaurants. I have flipped burgers, washed dishes and cleaned toilets and in the vast majority of those jobs I was not paid an award wage,” he said. “Generally the larger the organisation, the organisations that could afford to have payroll people to keep an eye on whether everyone was being paid accordingly, were the ones that paid better.
“Mum and Dad restaurants that couldn’t keep across the complexities of the award wage system were the ones that were paying below the award wage.
Earlier this month, the Fair Work Ombudsman found Calombaris’ MAdE Establishment company had underpaid 515 of their staff by a staggering $7.8 million in wages and superannuation from 2011 to 2017.
After news broke of the scandal, Orlaith Belfrage, a former waitress at Calombaris’ Hellenic Republic told The Project that the amount the TV star owes is actually a lot more, and she personally is still owed “anywhere between three and four thousand dollars”.
Belfrage explained that while working for Calombaris, she was incorrectly labelled as a casual worker, therefore missing out on overtime wages that a full-time worker is privy to.
“For my overtime, it was just explained that that was just how it is, and I can just suck it up and work the job, or leave,” she told the panel. “And I definitely think that this is systemic across the entire industry.”
She continued: “I completely believe there’s more to come. I personally have money owing to me. There’s a group of people I used to work with that I’m in contact with still that haven’t been contacted by this second or third wave of media around the MAdE establishment wage saga.
Although reports claim his staff have been repaid, the scandal lingers with the embattled chef not only out of his WA tourism gig, but now out of TV as well.
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