Hospitality industry is rife with exploitation
Everyone knows the hospitality industry is full of operators who exploit employees, particularly kids.
That’s the view of Chad Parkhill, the drinks columnist for Guardian Australia.
He cites the case of employers who seem to believe that they have no obligation to pay superannuation, or to pay out the eave balance at the end of a person’s employment.
And they don’t care if they’re told that the case will go to the Fair Work Ombudsman.
“Good luck with that,” is the standard response.
“The reality is that exploitation of all kinds is rife within Australia’s hospitality industry,” Parkhill write in The Guardian.
“Many employees are young and ill-informed about their workplace rights – and the perception that hospitality jobs are a temporary gig while you study or work towards something better doesn’t help pierce this veil of ignorance.”
“Of all of the hospitality workers I have ever spoken to about this subject, not one has said that they have always been paid correctly by their employers.”
A lot of this, he says, is because of the nature of the industry.
“There’s also a strong workplace culture in hospitality that inculcates and rewards a stoicism that verges on masochism – the industry venerates those with the ability to work hard for hours on end without a break, who can pull double shifts or “clopens” (closing one night and opening the next morning),” he writes.
“Combine this with the sense of discretion that comes with looking after strangers’ needs, and the consequence is an unofficial code of silence.”
He says there’s so much cash going through the till that it makes tax avoidance through cash-in-hand payments easier for these businesses to get away with.
Indeed, he points out that many hospitality venues actually have two sets of books.
First, there’s the “official”, confected set that gets presented to the tax office.
And then there’s the real set that records the business’s actual expenses and profits.
The bottom line, he points out, is that while the hospitality sector constitutes 7.2 per cent of Australia’s labour market, it was the subject of 39 per cent of the anonymous tip-offs the FWO received in 2016-17.
Leon Getler 5th June 2018.
