Adelaide eatery operator ordered to pay $802K
The Fair Work Ombudsman has secured more than $802,000 in court penalties and compensation after the husband-and-wife operators of two Vietnamese eateries in Adelaide underpaid migrant workers – including forcing them to buy their bosses bubble tea.
The Federal Court has ordered that Mr Viet Quoc Mai (Mr Mai) back-pay $407,546, plus interest and superannuation, owed to the 36 workers he underpaid as the operator of a ‘Mr Viet’ restaurant in Adelaide’s Rundle Mall and a food court outlet in Adelaide’s Chinatown precinct.
In addition, the Court has imposed a $265,000 penalty against Mr Mai and a $130,000 penalty against his wife and manager of the ‘Mr Viet’ eateries, Ms Huong Le, for her involvement in the contraventions.
The penalties were imposed for a range of contraventions – including giving false records to Fair Work Inspectors; underpaying or not paying minimum rates, weekend and public holiday loading, and overtime rates; failing to compensate employees for taking no meal breaks; and employees being unreasonably required to spend their own money.
The underpaid workers were mostly Vietnamese international students aged under 25, who the couple – themselves Vietnamese nationals – paid as little as $15 an hour when they were employed between January 2018 and September 2021. Five of the workers were junior employees aged from 18 to 20 at the time.
The workers were casuals, engaged as kitchen attendants and bar and waitstaff, and in customer service roles. Mr Mai and Ms Le underpaid individual workers amounts ranging from $75 to $58,592.
With regard to the unreasonable requirements to spend their money, Mr Mai had a “strike board system” to punish employees for mistakes they made at work. After six strikes against an employee’s name, that employee would be made to go and buy food and beverages for Mr Mai, Ms Le, and/or other employees working at the time.
As one example, in October 2020, an employee was dispatched to buy bubble teas for Ms Le and the other employees working in the restaurant that Saturday and the following Monday. In February 2021, an employee was made to transfer more than $50 to Ms Le’s personal bank account for the purchase of bubble teas, also for Ms Le and the other workers. The court ruled this was unreasonable in the circumstances.
Mr Mai also took money out of his employees’ pay packets for claims they incorrectly charged a customer, and for failing to properly close a refrigerator door. The court found that those deductions were not authorised and therefore contravened the law.
Workplace laws relating to record-keeping and issuing pay slips were also breached – including through giving false records to inspectors. Mr Mai even tried to make the regulator believe he was back-paying his workers, giving one of them $10,000, which he then made the worker withdraw and give back to him in what Justice Stephen McDonald called a “calculated and dishonest course of conduct”.
Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth said the contraventions were disgraceful.
“These substantial penalties highlight that exploiting vulnerable migrant workers is particularly reprehensible conduct that will not be tolerated in Australia,” Ms Booth said.
“If you exploit your workers you will be found out and called out. The respondents have been left with court orders to pay more than $800,000 because of their unlawful conduct.
“Among the long list of unacceptable conduct, we take a dim view of trying to trick the regulator into believing there is a good faith attempt to rectify non-compliance, only to force an employee who thought he was getting $10,000 to give it all back.
“We treat cases involving underpayments and use of false or misleading records impacting migrant workers particularly seriously, because we are conscious that they can be vulnerable due to lack of awareness of their rights or a reluctance to complain.
“We urge any workers with concerns to contact us. Visa holders should be reassured that if they speak out about alleged workplace breaches there are protections for their visa.”
The Court found that several of Mr Mai’s breaches – including non-payment and underpayment of rates and loadings and making and keeping false and misleading records were serious contraventions under the Protecting Vulnerable Workers laws, attracting a tenfold increase in maximum available penalties, because they were committed deliberately and systematically.
Fair Work Inspectors discovered the underpayments when auditing the eateries as part of surprise inspections of restaurants, cafés and fast food outlets in Adelaide’s Chinatown precinct in 2021. Those inspections recovered wages for more than 300 underpaid workers.
Justice Stephen McDonald noted Mr Mai’s obstruction to the FWO’s investigation, including providing an inspector with false or misleading records, instructing employees to lie to inspectors about their rates of pay, and prevailing upon one employee to repay, in cash, amounts that ostensibly had been given to him to rectify underpayments.
His Honour said specific deterrence of future breaches was needed because of Mr Mai’s dishonesty.
“Mr Mai’s repeated dishonest attempts to conceal contraventions and to mislead the FWO investigation leave me with a concern that he is a person who is prepared to act dishonestly when he thinks it will be to his benefit,” he said.
Justice McDonald said the underpaid workers were visa holders from backgrounds where English was not their first language, and accepted Mr Mai’s conduct was an exploitation of the employer/employee relationship, with the power dynamic favouring the employer.
He described a need to deter similar employers from such conduct, especially in the fast food and restaurants sector “whose employees may tend to be vulnerable to exploitation and who may be unwilling or unable to complain”.
The employees’ entitlements were set out under the Restaurant Industry Award 2010 and 2020, the Fast Food Industry Award 2010, and the Fair Work Act.
The Fair Work Ombudsman filed 146 litigations against employers involving visa holder workers, and secured nearly $23 million in penalties in cases that have included visa holder workers, in the seven financial years to June 2024.
Fair Work Ombudsman, 5th May 2025
