Susie O’Brien: George’s staff are the people I feel sorry for

Don’t feel sorry for celebrity chef George Calombaris, feel sorry for the staff who were underpaid and now face the prospect of losing their jobs, writes Susie O’Brien.

Don’t feel sorry for celebrity chef George Calombaris. Feel sorry for his staff who were underpaid for years and face losing their jobs as his restaurant business struggles to survive.

It’s been a steady decline for the former MasterChef judge from 2017, when his company was found to have underpaid staff to the tune of $2.6 million. By 2019 he was stripped of his lucrative and influential TV role and his staff underpayment bill blew out to an astonishing $7.8 million.

By November last year, Calomabris was begging people to eat at his flagship eateries, which closed one by one.

And now 2020 isn’t looking much better.

His Toorak mansion is for sale, his Safety Beach house is gone and his company MADE Establishment is in serious difficulties.

How did it come to this?

The problem is not just that a wealthy celebrity chef failed to pay his staff properly. The problem is also Calombaris himself. His actions haven’t lived up to his rhetoric.

People hate phonies — especially rich phonies.

Calombaris can’t insist that every one of his 640 employees are “more than colleagues, we are family” and then underpay them to the tune of nearly $8 million.

And he can’t insist that his company “self-reported” the problem of underpayment in 2017 to the Fair Work Commission. In fact, the first sign of something wrong emerged in 2015 when a staff member alerted the commission.

MasterChef judge George Calombaris’ wage scandal has worsened over the past year. Picture: Nicole Cleary

It didn’t help that early attempts by Calomabris and his crew to hose down the wages story led to the issue being dismissed as a payroll error.

Payroll errors don’t usually last six years and cost up to $8 million.

Calombaris has also made the entire sorry episode about him instead of about his staff. He didn’t mean it. He was busy. He didn’t put the right systems in place.

As he revealed in one magazine cover story, he was doing meditation to cope with the stress of it all.

But his emphasis should have been less about his own state of mind and more about his staff who were underpaid by about $16,000 each. That’s a lot of money for a chef earning $25 an hour.

His self-focus was misplaced because Calombaris has brought on himself just about every problem he’s has encountered in recent years.

“I’m not the type to wither away and hide,” he said back in July 2018. Pity. It might be better if he had hidden himself away from the spotlight a bit more.

The more Calombaris talked about himself, the less sympathy people felt and the less inclined they were to spend their hard-earned dollars in his up-market eateries.

Perhaps they remembered Calombaris complaining back in 2012 about the high penalty rates that make Sunday and weekend trading unprofitable.

“It’s not like they’ve had to go to uni for 15 years,” he said.

Hellenic Republic restaurant in Brighton, owned by George Calombaris, on Monday afternoon. Picture: AAP

And yet his businesses were highly profitable. Calombaris was acting as if he was still a Datsun 180B driver when he was in fact swanning around in a Maserati, amassing a multimillion-dollar property portfolio.

And there he was moaning about having to pay people their award wages? Extraordinary.

The “he’s just a chef” line trotted out when the extent of the underpayment was disclosed didn’t wash either.

At the time he was spending half a year filming and travelling as a MasterChef judge, opening restaurants in Melbourne, Sydney, Queensland and Greece, writing cookbooks and engaging in a range of vanity projects.

He had time for all that, but no time to make sure his staff were looked after properly.

Few people believe the underpayment was deliberate, but negligence isn’t much better.

A lot of people were underpaid over a very long time and repayments dragged on for a handful of staff, which was a very bad look.

That is why no one’s feeling all that sorry for Calombaris.

George was riding high for much of the past decade as a judge on MasterChef. Picture: Network 10

There are no calls for customers to save his ravaged empire and return to his restaurants and buy a meal.

Calombaris recently said he wants mental health improvement to be his legacy in the hospitality industry.

“I can say hand on my heart I wouldn’t change anything that has happened. I know the mistakes I have made, and I have learnt from them,” he said.

“Dream daily and understand if you don’t take risks in life, the rewards aren’t going to feel so good.”

He hasn’t learnt much, or he’d stop making it all about himself and trying to dismiss a $8 million scandal as a simple mistake or risk he can dream away. I’ll bet his staff, who had to get by on $2000 less a year on average, would change things if they could.

Calombaris also hasn’t learnt that when you’re the one in the wrong, you don’t get to determine your legacy. Others do that for you. And it seems like the people have turned their back on Calombaris Inc.

Susie O’Brien is a Herald Sun columnist.

@susieob

Originally published as Susie O’Brien: George’s staff are the people I feel sorry for