Culture

George Calombaris Blames Worker Underpayment On Lack Of “Sophistication In The Back-End”

Sometimes $7.8 million just slips through the cracks, you know?

by Sam Langford  1 August 2019
george calombaris

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Former Masterchef host George Calombaris has told the ABC’s 7.30 that the $7.8 million wage theft scandal at his restaurants was the result of a lack of “sophistication in the back-end”, whatever that means.

In an interview with Leigh Sales, Calombaris said that he takes full responsibility for underpaying his workers, but also argued that as a young chef starting his restaurants, “you assume that in the back-end things are happening at the same speed”.

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“You know, think about 13 years ago, you’re a young chef, 26 years of age,” he said. “You want to open your first restaurant, you get together with three other partners at that point, and you open the first one. Then the second one opens, the third one — the creativity is flying, the ideas are flying, the dreaming is there. Um, but the sophistication in the back-end wasn’t there.”

“I’m not here to blame anyone. I take full responsibility,” he added, before saying that “philosophically you get to a point in your life where you go, ‘I need to just make some changes’. Three and a bit years ago, I get new business partners, and said hang on, let’s slow down. Let’s look at everything holistically, let’s audit everything, let’s put process in.”

That’s nice, except that paying your workers correctly shouldn’t be something that occurs to you at a philosophical moment in your life. As Sales pointed out, “isn’t ensuring that staff are not exploited your most important and basic obligation?”.

“They’re everything to us,” Calombaris responded. “Um, and, that’s why at that point I was gutted to the point where I’m like, ‘oh, my gosh'”. Pretty gutted, in other words.

Sales also pointed out that the size of the underpayment was close to $8 million — quite a considerable amount to have slip through the cracks. “The average person watching this might think, ‘that doesn’t sound like just not paying enough attention to detail. That sounds like a systemic effort to avoid paying people what they really deserve to get paid,'” she said.

“It’s called not having the proper infrastructure in the background to make sure that we’re — the classifications are being checked and done correctly,” Calombaris said.

“There is no excuse for what I did. There is no excuse. But I — you know, I truly believe that we owned up, we paid up, and we did that two years ago.”

Calombaris also used the interview to repeatedly apologise to his staff, and to stress that he plans to do better in future.

“I need to lead by example,” he said. “I hope the rest of the industry sees this and says, ‘I’m going to double-check and triple-check everything in my business, more than just the potatoes and the carrots.'”

And sure, good on Calombaris for planning on doing the bare minimum for workers going forward. Many are not particularly impressed by his apology though, pointing out that 7.30 didn’t bother to ask him whether any workers ever pointed out underpayment, nor did Sales grill him particularly hard on how he managed to miss underpayment of $7.8 million for a period of years.

You can watch the full interview below.