Student underpaid, sacked by text

A RESTAURANT owner who underpaid an overseas student then sacked her via text message has been fined more than $70,000.

Fire & Stone restaurant on Moreton Island. Picture: Google Street View

A RESTAURANT owner who underpaid an overseas student then sacked her via text message when she complained has been fined more than $70,000.

Jia Ning Wang, who owns and operates the Fire and Stone Restaurant on Queensland’s Moreton Island, has been slapped with a $20,366 penalty and his company an additional $51,830 for his “deliberate and calculated” exploitation of a young international student over a two-week period in December 2014.

The American student, then aged 21, performed 69.75 hours of waitressing work. According to the Fair Work Ombudsman, when she refused to be paid under the minimum wage, Wang threatened to sack her, telling her the award was “just a guideline” and $20 per hour was the “standard minimum wage across the industry”.

He later sent her a text message terminating her employment, stating that she “was not working out” and that “technically you don’t work for us”. The student contacted the Ombudsman after Wang failed to pay her for any work she performed.

He initially denied the allegations or that he had ever employed the student, before admitting to breaking workplace laws and finally back-paying the student $1963 in wages almost a year after they were owed.

The FWO said that in addition to underpayment, the threat to sack the student violated the section of the Fair Work Act that makes it unlawful to take adverse action against an employee for exercising a workplace right.

Wang and his company also broke the law against “recklessly or deliberately” making a false or misleading representation to an employee about their workplace rights.

Judge Michael Jarrett praised the resilience of the student, who said she found pursuing her wages “mentally exhausting” and that she had called her mother in tears after Wang threatened to dismiss her “because I didn’t want to lose my job for doing the right thing and standing up for myself and my rights”.

“Laudably [the student] revealed herself to be very proactive and effective in looking out for her own interests,” Judge Jarrett said. “[Mr Wang’s] attempts to take advantage of her youth and her status as a visitor to this country were ineffective.”

Judge Jarrett described the contraventions as “serious”, saying that “the conduct of the respondents that constitute the contraventions was plainly deliberate and calculated”.

Last year, Wang and his company were penalised $21,000 for paying a young Chinese backpacker just $10 an hour. Judge Jarrett noted that the conduct occurred despite Wang having been “put on notice”.

“I think the background is also relevant because it demonstrates that Golden Vision or Mr Wang seems to have done little to change their business practices,” he said. “The respondents should be left in no doubt that its conduct and treatment of [the student] was an extremely serious contravention of Australian workplace laws.”

Acting Fair Work Ombudsman Michael Campbell said the Court’s decision sent a message that exploiting international students was serious conduct with serious consequences. “Australia’s minimum pay rates apply to everyone including visa holders, they are not negotiable,’’ he said.