In 1932, an artist and member of the German Communist Party produced a cover for Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (Workers’ Pictorial Newspaper), the highest-circulating left-wing magazine in the country at the time. Titled The Meaning of the Hitler Salute: Little Man Asks for Big Gifts, the cover pictured Germany’s soon-to-be Führer making the Nazi salute. Behind him, a giant, faceless businessman was handing him a wad of cash. Captioned between the pair: “Motto: millions stand behind me!” 
The implication that German capitalists were backing the Nazis was one of the many works that cemented the man behind the image, John Heartfield, as a staunch anti-fascist, renowned artist and an early pioneer of the artistic process known today as photomontage. Hitler was well known for his hatred of the “<a href="https://socialistworker.co.uk/art/7063/Degenerate+Art+++a+celebration+of+works+the+Nazis+hated">cultural Bolshevism</a>” of modern art. And while his hatred of Heartfield forced the artist to flee Germany, it’s unknown whether he objected to being depicted accepting a bribe from a giant.
Almost half a century later, and on the other side of the world, Australian Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was brought down in the Kerr coup by the governor-general and the conservative opposition leader Malcolm Fraser. In response to the period that preceded the coup, Wollongong-born artist Michael Callaghan produced the photomontage Give Fraser the Razor with the Earthworks Poster Collective. 
The screen-printed poster depicts the man who overthrew Whitlam and oversaw a massive winding back of social gains. A straight razor is held to his throat, coupled with the double entendre: “Cut back the ruling class”. Famous for tapping into the working-class bitterness of the time, <a href="https://revoltsnow.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/michael-callaghan-artist-raconteur-reader-collector-pleasure-seeker-holder-of-hearts/">the posters</a> were plastered about city streets, rather than in galleries. It is unclear if Fraser himself saw the poster of his violent predicament, let alone responded to it. 
Not long after, the Sex Pistols released their infamous single God Save the Queen. The cover art, by Jamie Reid, is Queen Elizabeth’s mugshot with the single title pasted over her eyes and the band’s name covering her mouth, written in ransom-note-style letters. The song and image were considered by many as a vicious attack on the UK’s most famous parasite. Whether you thought the band was the embodiment of the country’s rage against the system or just <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/10/26/why-one-punk-rocks-icons-is-sporting-maga-shirt/">closet Tories</a> cashing in on a cultural phenomenon (they were probably a little of both), the single’s release marked a turning point in the history of music. 
Not only did it make punk “cool”; it also became the soundtrack to the youth despair and nihilism of the mid-1970s as high unemployment and recession gripped the West. As Johnny Rotten, the lead vocalist, famously sang: “No future. No future for you”. It’s unlikely they were fans of the music genre, but the royals, to their credit, made no public denials of her majesty’s Patty Hearst-like kidnapping or of photos being taken against her will. Because it didn’t happen.
Thanks to the ease with which memes are generated today, photomontage is arguably more prevalent than at any other time in the past. And it is still being used to ridicule the powerful. Yet Scott Morrison is acting like he’s never heard of a political cartoon. This week, a photomontage of a grinning Australian soldier slitting the throat of an Afghan child—with further corpses buried under an Australian flag—was shared on Twitter by a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson. Created by Beijing-based artist Fu Yu a.k.a. Qilin, it’s an unambiguous comment on <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7461">SAS war crimes in Afghanistan</a>. And the photo, more than the war crimes themselves, sent the prime minister and Australia’s media into fits of moral outrage. 
The response could, in part, be a testament to the artist’s mad Photoshop skills. The image has been endlessly reported as “<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-55126569">fake</a>”, “<a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-01/doctored-image-of-australian-soldier-tweeted-by-chinese-diplomat/12938244">doctored</a>”, “<a href="https://www.news.com.au/national/politics/us-ambassador-china-should-learn-from-australia/news-story/169e3bcdb0caecc18f88f6df81afa982">fabricated</a>” and other such adjectives, with many media outlets bizarrely blurring the face of the (not real) child hostage. At the time of writing, a news.com.au search of “Australian soldier fake” returns 103 results, whereas “Australian soldier art” returns only twenty. The falsification disclaimer is repeatedly offered, as if the whole world is incapable of telling the difference between a caricature and an actual photograph. Not to mention that occupying soldiers don’t generally drape their murdered victims in giant over-sized flags. The takeaway message appears to boil down to: China = bad. Australia = definitely not bad. 
Fu Yu has been accused of being a “semi-official propaganda artist” for the Chinese state. It’s quite possible. <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/china-should-be-totally-ashamed-pm-demands-china-take-down-post-20201130-p56j4p.html">He’s certainly no radical</a>. Regardless, the Australian state remains a ruthless purveyor of violence with its own imperial interests. It’s also conceivable the artist is genuinely horrified—as many are—by the culture of Australia’s most elite killers. As the depths of the depravity of the SAS’s crimes <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/01/afghans-outraged-at-image-of-australian-soldier-drinking-from-prosthetic-leg">begin to emerge</a>, Scott “<a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/news/i-stopped-these-pm-s-boat-trophy-gains-international-notoriety">I stopped these</a>” Morrison insists that Beijing should be “utterly ashamed” for sharing the “repugnant” image. 
The left shouldn’t suggest the hands of Chinese capitalism are blood free. But that misses the point. Morrison and Co. are determined to divert attention from the outing of Australian-made war criminals. Shortly before his death in 1968, Heartfield <a href="https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/arts/visual-art/item/2783-john-heartfield-satirist-anti-fascist-and-fearless-communist">stressed</a> the urgency of anti-war activists mobilising internationally against our countries’ warmongers, because their side is forever mobilising. The same can be said of today.

Azlan McLennan

Photomontage has always been political

“Crown Casino is the epitome of greed”, Cameron, a member of the Electrical Trades Union, says as we chat. We’re on our way to the casino, Australia’s biggest single-site employer. Union members and supporters are handing out leaflets as we snake our way through the lunchtime traffic.
We’re heading to Crown to protest its decision to sack 16 of its gaming techs – most of them long-term employees – at the end of the month. Their highly specialised jobs maintaining Crown’s sea of pokies are being outsourced. The “external supplier” that has been contracted to “deliver services, parts and labour” to Crown is owned by Liberal former premier Jeff Kennett. The move will further add to the coffers of the Crown Resorts monolith, which raked in a net profit of $393.6 million last financial year.
Kennett has a well-known history of shady dealing with Crown Casino. As Victorian premier in 1993, Kennett, despite widespread opposition over plans for a casino, awarded the lucrative licence to run Victoria’s only casino to his Liberal Party mates Ron Walker and Lloyd Williams, who would later sell to Kerry Packer.
Workers employed by Kennett’s pokies maintenance outfit, Amtrek Corporation, will be paid around half of what the current technicians receive. And even if they wanted to do the same work on half the pay, the Crown workers are prohibited from applying for any of the “new” jobs under Crown’s redundancy policy.
“It’s bad enough that the casino’s prepared to steal from gamblers. It’s an absolute fraud that they’ll steal from workers as well”, John Webb, Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union organiser, says. The AMWU isn’t involved in the Crown dispute, but it knows that outsourcing is a scourge that can affect any industry.
When we arrive at the casino, Victorian Trades Hall secretary Luke Hilikari explains that the Crown 16 have been threatened with the sack if they set foot in the rally. The state secretary of the ETU, Troy Gray, and ACTU secretary Sally McManus address the crowd. But it’s an ETU delegate involved in last year’s CUB protest, Paul Jeffares, whose call to arms stands out:
“The only real answer to such organised greed … is organised labour … Fundamental change will only come by good, decent hard-working people, standing around fires in 44-gallon drums in the middle of the night, with nothing more than a belief that we can make a difference.”

Jeff Kennett behind shameful deal to sack casino workers

On 1 July, 700,000 workers in hospitality and other low-paid industries copped the first of a number of scheduled cuts to their Sunday penalty rates. That same day, federal politicians were given a pay rise of around $4,000 a year. Once the Sunday penalty rates cut has been phased in, the ACTU has calculated that workers affected will lose up to $77 a week – or around $4,000 a year. The politicians may as well drop any pretence of decency and light their cigars with these workers’ flaming rent money.
While the penalty rates cuts remain deeply unpopular, the Fair Work Commission’s decision opens the door for other employers to follow. Better organised sections of the union movement are making clear that they’ll fight for their entitlements. On 20 June, the CFMEU pulled thousands of construction workers off site to oppose the reintroduction of the ABCC. Also on the union’s list of grievances with the Turnbull government is its attacks on penalty rates.
However, United Voice – the union covering hospitality workers – unfortunately did not appear to use these rallies as a chance to mobilise its members in their own defence. There was no call for members to join other unionists in the thousands-strong rallies against the government’s attacks on workers.
Instead, United Voice is hoping to overturn the penalty rates decision in the courts and is posting excited reports about Bill Shorten’s promise to reverse the cuts if elected. Well, Labor has already given us WorkChoices-lite (the Fair Work Act), and it was the courts that handed us the wage cuts in the first place.
ACTU secretary Sally McManus’ recent call for unionists to be “disrupters” to the neoliberal status quo is a breath of fresh air from the country’s peak union body. But what does this mean? On 23 June, she emailed unionists and supporters asking them to take action on penalty rates by “walking into [your] local pub, club, bar or café and convincing the owners or managers not to slash the pay of hardworking staff”.
“National Weekend Warrior Day”, held on 2 July, was the latest effort by the ACTU to strike fear into the hearts of the big employer associations. It was ostensibly a campaign for workers and customers to beg individual bosses and businesses not to implement the penalty rates cuts.
In the lead-up to the big day, hospo workers received chirpy stickers or beer coasters proclaiming that their boss will maintain their weekend penalty rates. Assuming they don’t get fired for asking in the first place, workers whose employers pledge not to cut their wages can share with the world how great their boss is.
“If we can get a buzz happening across the country it’ll show everyone – workers and employers – that we’re not going to accept a pay cut people can’t afford and don’t deserve”, said the organising email. In the absence of any real strategy to fight for our penalty rates, the buzz that I’m picking up is the opposite.

Real action on penalty rates still lacking

The side exterior wall of Newtone Betta Home Living in Footscray is well muraled.
One orange-faced character, shown in four stages of life, could be straight out of Motörhead. He goes from moustache to goatee to pencil mo then full angular styling, with a constant full black mullet as his hairline recedes. A wonderful streetscape of workers’ cottages follows, almost life size.
Then comes the pup. The Western Bulldogs’ mascot has wide, innocent eyes. They look right at you as he cocks his leg and pees on the wall. Well, now it’s just a wall. Originally, it was Pauline Hanson’s face.
Melbourne artist Van Than Rudd’s latest work has been half painted over by the local council. It took just 48 hours of complaints from snowflake right wingers for the council to act in the name of decency, labelling the mural “offensive”. It’s a whitewash, which is appallingly apt.
“It sends a very strong political message, even though the council said it wasn’t political”, says Van. “I think they’re protecting Hanson and her supporters from criticism. They claim that the artwork was ‘offensive’ because of a dog peeing on a politician. But they consciously or subconsciously neglect to regard One Nation’s politics as inherently divisive, destructive and extremely offensive toward large groups of people, including in the Footscray region.”
Across the street, there’s a disco-themed International Women’s Day mural depicting a South Asian and an African woman. “STAY STRONG”, it reads.
“I’ve been living in Melbourne’s west for about 12 years”, says Van. “I’ve grown attached to the strong presence of refugees and migrants who’ve come from Asian countries, as well as those from the Middle East and the African continent. There is also the influence of urban Indigenous activists and artists in the area.”
About 60 percent of the local population was born overseas. At the other end of the shopping district is Footscray Market. It’s a good-natured, raucous-spruiking, grab-it-while-you-can atmosphere inside. No-one seems to be talking the same language, but everyone understands the bargain of $1 kilo sweet mandarins. The stall proprietor is calling out to the world and tossing plastic bags at anyone who looks interested.
Over on Nicholson Street, men and women are more relaxed congregating outside Ethiopian cafés. The biggest migrant groups come from Vietnam and China – the people that Hanson first vilified to build her political career in the late 1990s.
Kuan Pung, who owns Betta Home Living and gave Van permission to paint on the wall, wonders what all the fuss is about. “I thought it was very humorous”, he says. “It’s free speech. She can come and say all these things and it is fine. But this was just a painting.”
Several decades ago, Kuan came to Australia as a refugee from Cambodia, “from the killing fields”. He’s been in Footscray ever since.
Van wants to highlight the unity underlying much of this diversity. “It’s a region known for its working class roots. The Bulldog’s fan base is a growing mixture of these elements. It was important to combine and contrast them to Hanson’s blatant racism and far right bigotry”, he says.
Hanson, speaking to ABC News, said she wasn’t offended by the mural, but labelled it “rubbish”. Her supporters, however, were both more precious and more vitriolic.
“Many fascists and Islamophobes, judging by their social media comments, know that Melbourne has a strong anti-racist current and that there was clearly a lot of support for the mural”, says Van.
“One could say to the far right, ‘You’ll never win in Melbourne, and you surely won’t win in Footscray!’”

Ben Hillier

Hanson supporters sook over mural

The verdict is in: the attack on penalty rates is class war. The dress rehearsal for going after the nurses, ambos, firies and everyone else’s penalty rates is a historic defeat for our side. For me – a hospo worker – the Fair Work Commission decision is like a punch in the guts.
But the attacks aren’t likely to end there. Another group will be in the firing line next. That’s how business and governments always try to win, by dividing us and then picking us off.
Terry, a regular at a pub I used to work at, is a shop steward with the CFMEU. He joined in one of the last rallies to defend penalty rates. He told me a story about how, after the march, he ended up at a pub explaining to the bartender why he was protesting. “An attack on one worker is an attack on all of us”, he said to the worker he was talking to. It’s solidarity 101. That a construction worker had to explain this to a hospo worker in the first place is part of the problem.
The fact that since the ruling lots of hospo workers have been telling me, “I’ve never even been paid penalty rates anyway”, is another part of what’s wrong here. Hospitality workers are some of the least organised in the country. There’s no good reason for this. It’s just that our union has never seriously tried to organise in our workplaces.
Wherever I’ve worked, I’ve always tried to convince my workmates to join the union. We’ll always be easy targets if we don’t organise. The decision to go after our wages first is pretty clear evidence of the parlous strength of the union in the hospitality industry.
If it wants to turn this around, our union has to throw itself into the campaign to defeat the penalty rates decision. If it wants to lead workers in this sector, and give them a reason to join, it has to fight.

Penalty rates cut a punch in the gut

Workers at a Hog’s Breath Cafe in Perth have blown the lid off the restaurant chain’s practice of paying workers under-award wages.
In February, United Voice and Socialist Alternative member Melinda Joseph circulated an open letter to co-workers at the Kelmscott Hog’s Breath outlet where she is a waiter. The letter notified Hog’s Breath staff that the WorkChoices-era agreement they are paid under has wage rates lower than those prescribed by the restaurant industry award.
Melinda and her co-workers figured out that most of them were worse off than the award by an average of around $60 a week. Their agreement provides no penalty rates for weekend and late night work and offers no compensation for the removal of penalties. Also scrapped from the Hog’s Breath agreement are overtime payments, split shift allowances and annual leave loading.
If Hog’s Breath workers win award conditions it would form an important step towards improving the lives of hospitality workers more broadly.
In a now familiar story in the Australian hospitality industry, Hog’s Breath management have retained a dodgy workplace deal that was pushed through under the Howard government’s anti-worker WorkChoices laws. The laws were repealed in 2008, but many of the agreements remain in effect.
With the backing of the hospitality workers’ union, Kelmscott Hog’s Breath staff have applied to the Fair Work Commission to terminate the agreement that covers them. As Melinda wrote in her letter:
“If no one challenges working below minimum conditions, [the conditions] will continue to persist and thrive. But if Hog’s Breath workers win award conditions it would form an important step towards improving the lives of hospitality workers more broadly.”
 A majority of workers at the Kelmscott outlet have signed up to support the application for award conditions. A section of the staff are also trying to make contact with workers at other Hog’s Breath cafes in Perth. A trip to the Joondalup Hog’s Breath provoked an angry response from management there, who insist that their workforce is “happy” with below award wages.
With more than 80 outlets across Australia and New Zealand, Hog’s Breath is a self-described “Australian success story” and boasts about being one of the largest fully licensed theme restaurant chains in the country.
Unsurprisingly, the official Hog’s Breath story omits mention of the chain’s practice of fair dinkum exploitation. Along with Grill’d and Subway, Hog’s Breath was one of the first companies to lodge bare-bones greenfields agreements when WorkChoices came into effect in March 2006. 
The franchise bosses need to get their hog snouts out of the trough and pay up to avoid a humiliating public battle about their practice of ripping off young workers. “WorkChoices was meant to be abolished after Labor won the 2007 election”, Melinda told Red Flag. “The Liberals have declared WorkChoices ‘dead, buried and cremated’.
“Almost a decade down the track, these antiquated laws are still dictating the wages and conditions of many workers in Hog’s Breath Cafes around the country … We’ve decided to take a stand – for ourselves and other workers, now and in the future.”
Sign the <a href="https://www.megaphone.org.au/petitions/stop-using-workchoices-to-underpay-your-workers">petition </a>in support or head to the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/bringinghomethebacon2016/">Facebook </a>page for more information.

Hog’s Breath bosses’ snouts in the trough

Areas such as Brunswick, in Melbourne’s inner north, have long fallen prey to gentrification. The working class and migrant communities have gradually been squeezed out.
According to Victoria’s Department of Transport, Planning and Local Infrastructure, 40 years ago, about two-thirds of Brunswick houses were priced in the bottom 25 percent of all houses in Melbourne. By 2007, more than 90 percent were in the top 50 percent.
Walking down Sydney Road, it’s hard to imagine that the pubs in the area were sites of rebellion and historical significance. Many of them were built in the 1850s to accommodate the gold rush population explosion.
Laura Donati’s Almost pretty: a history of Sydney Road provides at least a superficial glance at some of this history. In 1896, outside the Sarah Sands Hotel (now Bridie O’Reilly’s), some 20,000 Irish and Catholics confronted and battled loyalist Protestants during their annual Orange march.
In the 1930s, the Communist Party led the fight to defend free speech against repressive state laws prohibiting street corner speak-outs, culminating in an impressive campaign of civil disobedience outside the Retreat Hotel.
As recently as 1994, anti-racists stood up to the neo-Nazi outfit National Action after the Sarah Sands shamefully permitted them to use the pub as their local. The Nazis were chased off Sydney Road and into Jewell Station.
I’ve been a bartender for many years and worked a number of joints up and down Sydney Road. Without doubt, my favourite regular at my last job was an old bloke called Les. He’d hobble in every day at lunchtime with his walking frame and sit in the corner, sipping light beer while listening to his radio – always the races, which he’d bet on.
People like Les are the ones being forced out. He certainly didn’t make management’s desired clientele list. He’s what you might call “old Brunswick”. The last time I bumped into him he told me he had to find another local, after my boss had shortened his trading hours to cut back on staff wages.
While heartbreaking, it was also rage inducing. All up Sydney Road, the pubs have been done up and the beer prices raised to push out old Brunswick and attract a more wealthy clientele. Behind this stand soaring property prices and a lack of public housing.
One of the participants in the Depression-era free speech campaign was artist and committed communist Noel Counihan, who notoriously gave a speech outside the Retreat from an iron cage bolted to a horse-drawn cart. It took the cops a while to pry him out and arrest him.
Today, Moreland City Council concedes: “Counihan was deeply committed to the predicament of the underprivileged in society”. It would serve us well not only to remember activists like Counihan, but also the workers who built, ran, lived and fought in places such as Brunswick.
But maybe there’s hope. This year, a pub in Paddington, a former working class suburb of Sydney, banned hi-vis vests – the kind that miners and road workers wear. The resulting social media backlash gave a glimpse of a spirit that still lives:
“Another wanker hipster establishment, imitating trends instead of creating them, discriminating against workers because all you want is idiots with beards and pretentious tattoos?”
“Well if tradies aren’t allowed in, who is going to fix the electrics, plumbing … Who is going to deliver the kegs, the wine and spirits and the quinoa?”
“Get ready for all the hate mail … Us Hi-viz. workers stick together !!! United we stand.”

A tale of two Brunswicks

“There’s nothing like getting back for getting better.” It’s the main slogan of a campaign currently being run by Victoria’s workplace safety authority. The campaign is based on the lie that injured workers don’t really want to go back to work, that if only they were more “positive” and “proactive”, they would get back on the job sooner. The reality is that when you get injured at work, your boss holds all the cards. Azlan McLennan tells his story. 
----------
I worked as a bartender at the Edinburgh Castle Hotel in Melbourne for nearly two years. The Castle is a fairly typical pub in Brunswick. The boss also owns three other similarly uninspiring, overpriced bars in trendy inner city ghettos.
The Castle is marketed as “Brunswick’s longest standing pub”. It spruiks its “family friendly” environment, targeting young middle class families. They’ve even won awards for being a favourite in such circles.
Last year, I suffered a serious back injury while working there and began receiving workers compensation entitlements. The pub was forced to pay me my average weekly earnings as I slowly returned to my pre-injury work hours while recovering. That’s when the bullying started.
Over the Christmas period, management left me off the roster for a week. No problem, I thought. I used the time to fly to Brisbane to visit my sick father. I got back to find I hadn’t been paid. When I questioned why, “Because you took a holiday” was the answer.
I reported this breach to the insurance company while the boss played dumb. After more than two months of stalling, he was finally forced to pay me what I was owed. No apologies, though.
During this time, it became clear to me that his strategy was to make working for him unbearable so I would quit. A manager revealed to me that the pub’s accountant, speaking of me, instructed her to “help him as little as possible”.
When my Workcover payments eventually stopped, my hours were immediately reduced. My father died shortly after this, and I went to Brisbane to bury him. The boss used this “holiday” as an opportunity to cut my Sunday shifts altogether. Anyone who works in hospitality knows how important Sunday penalty rates are. They can mean the difference between eating or not.
Apparently, the Castle’s “family friendly” ethos doesn’t extend to its employees when a family members dies.
After this new low, a sympathetic manager suggested I look for another job. They told me that the boss was planning to get rid of me but had to wait until a few months after my Workcover payments stopped, so as to “not look dodgy in Fair Work Australia’s eyes”.
When I confronted him about this, he sent me home and fired me by text message the next morning. 
This kind of discrimination is not an anomaly in the hospitality industry; rather, it’s a blueprint for how to run a business. Make profits at all costs and stomp on anyone who questions your bloated sense of entitlement. Let no person stand in the way of your God-given right to make a buck, least of all a worker asserting their rights.
The system we live under of course rewards this kind of sociopathic behaviour. The “independent umpire”, the Business Council of Australia and their loyal servants in Liberal party, the ALP and a cynical union bureacracy ensure workers always come last.
Young workers, in particular, have next to no rights. In place of basic solidarity and unionism are fear, competition and the promise of advancement if they too are willing to give up on any idea fairness. The only way our side can turn this around is to rebuild a culture of militant rank and file unionism in our workplaces.

Getting fired for getting injured

Grill’d burger chain founder Simon Crowe sees himself as a good bloke. Sure, he’s a Business Review Weekly young rich lister, worth $23 million by the age of 40, but Crowe is so much more than that. He’s a pioneer, bravely charging more for a burger than Ronald McDonald ever dreamed possible.
“Our job is to walk the path less travelled”, he once said of his company’s business philosophy. While everyone else “zigs”, Grill’d “zags”, according to its website.
Crowe doesn’t merely sell over-priced burgers; he “gives customers permission to shop the category of burgers in a guilt-free, healthy and contemporary fashion”, according to an interview with BRW. Thanks, Sime.
Since 2004, when he opened his first Grill’d shopfront in Hawthorn, a Melbourne suburb, Crowe has grown his business to nearly 100 stores nationally. The Australian has called him a “rebel”, and BRW describes his brand as “an irreverent challenger to authority and dominance”.
Not only does this fast food freedom fighter want to provide his customers with the freshest and healthiest food in a “cool environment”; Crowe also wants to “give back” to the community. One of things that makes Grill’d different, one of it’s “zags”, is its “local matters” campaign – where restaurants split $500 between three local charities each month. 
Last month it was reported that a Brisbane Grill’d outlet decided to give back to anti-abortion group Cherish Life. After a backlash on social media, Crowe claimed it was all a big mistake and assured us the company was pro-choice.
However, it’s the recent sacking of 20-year-old Kahlani Pyrah from the Grill’d Camberwell franchise that has most exposed the darker side of the company’s carefully constructed ethical image. Kahlani and her workmates realised they were being paid below the award; some weren’t even getting minimum wage. They spoke up, and Kahlani was pushed out the door.
When Crowe got around to fronting up publicly about the scandal that followed, he claimed, “We’ve got a wonderful relationship with our staff”, a way of “making our burgers with love”. He admitted that it’s been “a difficult situation”, though. What’s been difficult is the outpouring of anger on social media and the petition signed by more then 20,000 in support of Kahlani and decent wages.
Despite concerted attacks on penalty rates, a majority still think that workers in hospitality and other industries with anti-social hours should be paid fairly. Not the irreverent guys at Grill’d though. Where others “zig” they “zag”.
Kahlani’s bosses at the Camberwell franchise of Grill’d, brothers Matt and Brad Walker, are no doubt also finding the damage done to their brand “difficult”. The winners of a number of awards in the Oscars-like Franchise Council of Australia Excellence in Franchising Awards, the Walkers tell us, “You need to be the brand”. To aspiring franchise investors, Matt advises: “Talk to people that work in the business and understand the ugly truths”. If those people tell you they’re not being paid properly – fire them. It’s the Grill’d way.

The Grill’d recipe: Young workers, low wages and plenty of spin

Remember all the bluster about penalty rates crippling the hospitality industry? According to an investigation by the Fair Work Ombudsman, recently revealed in the Australian Financial Review, 46 percent of hospitality businesses audited in 2012-13 failed to pay their workers the legal minimum. The report found that 2,752 workers had been underpaid a total of $1.2 million in wages over the year. One in six breaches related to weekend penalty rates.
Restaurant and Catering Australia chief executive John Hart says that the report’s release is timed to embarrass employers, who, at the time, were battling “widespread confusion” about the transition to modern awards. According to Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry head Kate Carnell, award wage rates are too complicated. Anyway, “The number of breaches established in this survey is small”, she said. More than $1 million in stolen wages is no big thing to an executive who doesn’t have to work weekends to pay the rent.
Last year, Joe “get a good job” Hockey asked us to “consider the economic impact of Sunday penalty rates”. According to a January Essential poll, eight out of 10 Australians have considered it and think that people who work anti-social hours should be paid higher rates. Despite a concerted effort, neither the government nor the bosses have been able to shift the mood about penalty rates. The embarrassing facts keep getting in the way.
The restaurant and cafe sector is booming. Writing in Crikey earlier this year, Bernard Keane pointed out that in 2013-14: “The broader accommodation and food services sector was second only to the health and social care sector for net growth in businesses, and nearly all of that growth was in cafes and restaurants, takeaway food shops and pubs”. 
The food and beverage services industry also ranks among the top sectors for job growth over the last five years, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics data. An 18 percent increase in jobs in the sector over that period was less only than the health and road transport industries. For all the hysteria about penalty rates costing jobs and threatening businesses, hospitality bosses are making a killing in a growing sector.

Photomontage has always been political

Jeff Kennett behind shameful deal to sack casino workers

Real action on penalty rates still lacking

Hanson supporters sook over mural

Penalty rates cut a punch in the gut

Hog’s Breath bosses’ snouts in the trough

A tale of two Brunswicks

Getting fired for getting injured

The Grill’d recipe: Young workers, low wages and plenty of spin

Hospitality bosses ‘confused’ by award wages

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