Shameless conduct: ACTU turns up heat on fallen celebrity chef George Calombaris

The ACTU says George Calombaris ‘stole $8 million’ from his workers at the same time he was a ‘poster boy’ for cutting penalty rates.

George Calombaris has spoken on camera. Picture: ABC/7.30

ACTU president Michele O’Neil has ramped up union attacks on George Calombaris, accusing the celebrity chef of “shameless” conduct by “stealing” workers’ wages while being the “poster boy” for employers campaigning for penalty rate cuts.

In a Facebook video, Ms O’Neil criticised Mr Calombaris as she called on union members to email Senate crossbenchers and urge them to oppose the Coalition’s second attempt to pass the union-restricting Ensuring Integrity Bill.

Ms O’Neil said despite the sports rorts controversy, the “corrupt” government wanted to lecture unions about integrity and pass laws to make it easier to deregister unions and ban union officials.

“And what about the fact that we also know that the behaviour of big business continues to be unacceptable,” she said.

“George Calombaris, the celebrity chef, that stole $8 million from the people who do the hard work in his restaurants by not paying them what they were legally entitled to,” she said.

“And not only did he underpay those workers, steal their legal entitlements and money, at the same time as he was doing that, he was out there as the poster boy for the employers that were campaigning to cut penalty rates to workers in that Industry. Shameless behaviour.”

“So what happens to him? Well now we see after a slap on the wrist from the government, and having to repay some of that money — we don’t think it’s all been repaid — he’s put his business into administration.

“So now more than 400 jobs on the line, at risk because George wasn’t prepared to run a fair legal business where he paid workers what they were entitled to. But do you think anything has happened to George? Is he being disqualified, is he being deregistered? No, we don't have a law for that.”

Mr Calombaris has said the $7.8 million in underpayments over six years to 515 current and former employees was back paid after being “self-reported” to the Fair Work Ombudsman.

In 2012, Mr Calombaris said penalty rates faced by restaurateurs under Labor’s Fair Work Act were uneconomical, and that employees at his new pasta bar would have to be paid $40 an hour on Sundays “and it’s not like they’ve had to go to uni for 15 years”.

An enforceable undertaking with the ombudsman showed staff were underpaid from 2011 to 2017, meaning Mr Calombaris was underpaying them at the same time he was complaining that the legal minimum rate was too high.

Swisse vitamins millionaire Radek Sali, who has 46 per cent of the Calombaris-led Made Establishment, said last year that staff were hired by the managers of the restaurants.

“He was filming MasterChef seven months of the year at this stage, so you have got to remember he was not in the business.

Ms Sali admitted his business partner should have paid more heed to the “letter of caution” the business received from the ombudsman in 2015 — two years before Sali found the underpayments as a result of an audit he commissioned by KPMG — and properly realised the implications of Calombaris replying to that letter to say he would carry out reconciliations for each employee and rectify any shortfalls.

Attorney-General Christian Porter has called the $200,000 “contrition payment” by Mr Calombaris a “light penalty”.