Spotlight on: Ben Schneiders
“Within about four months of the story Rockpool paid back their workers $1.6million for one year’s underpayment,” says the 2019 Industrial Relations Reporting Award-winner.
Industrial Relations Reporting Award
Ben Schneiders and Royce Millar, The Age, “SourDough: Australia’s High-End Restaurant Scandal”
Presented in commemoration of journalists Helen O’Flynn and Alan Knight, the Industrial Relations Reporting Award is an all media award for outstanding journalism that captures the complexities and the importance of a robust industrial relations ecosystem for Australian workers and businesses.
The judges said that Ben and Royce’s series of stories “demonstrated deep investigation and showcased months of work exposing new and specific revelations based on whistleblowers, hard work and persistent inquiries and compelling documentary evidence.
“It exposed a widespread scandal of systematically exploiting workers in Australia’s high-end restaurants in the face of strong denials. It masterfully balanced revelations of hard news with compelling feature stories which elicited public sympathy and engagement. The impact of the series was lasting. The fallout caused powerful investors and tax haven arrangements to be put under the microscope. It led to an investigation by the regulator, action and payouts by the businesses and deep community concern and engagement which served as a warning to others and created real change. It represents a beacon of journalism at its best.”
We interviewed Ben Schneiders about how they found the story, looking after vulnerable sources, and the power of journalism to effect change.
How did you find this story?
The first story we wrote was about the Rockpool Dining Group, the biggest high end restaurant group in the country. I was told about the story through a friend of a friend, then I started meeting with that person and with a number of chefs from some of these restaurants. Over a period of two to three months, we gathered evidence about what was going on, what the working conditions were like and what the hours were like.
What did it take to get this story up?
It was actually quite a time-consuming bit of work. We got a bunch of rosters, internal documents, pay slips. I had to speak to a number of employees at the Rockpool Group, and also make sense of the restaurant award, and how this rort worked.
Essentially the main way people were being underpaid was through the use of excessive unpaid overtime. There were some quirks in the award that allowed some unpaid overtime, but nowhere near the amount that people were being required to do. So in the end people were sometimes working 20, 30, 40 hours a week unpaid. And that pushed their wage well below the award.
So I was gathering all that evidence, trying to make sense of how widespread it was, over several months.
Do you think a lot of the people you spoke to understood how badly they were being taken advantage of?
The restaurant award itself is not super complex, but there’s a lack of awareness among workers in the industry about how the system works.
In this case there’s a lot of people who are migrant chefs on temporary visas, 457s and other visas. They’re doubly vulnerable. They may not know how the Australian system works, or the contract they’re given. And they’re also worried about speaking out because their residency in Australia is tied to their job. Losing their job can, in effect, mean being deported, it might mean going back to a country they were pretty keen to leave. They’re vulnerable workers, English is their second language, and so getting a sense of reading different parts of the award and what their rights are isn’t that practical.
There’s a lot of discussion in journalism at the moment around whistleblowers and journalists protecting them, in terms of national security. But this is a different case of the pressure on journalists to protect their sources. What responsibility do you feel to the people that you’re interviewing for a story like this?
I felt an extremely high sense of responsibility and obligation to them in this case. If you stuff up a story around wage theft or underpayment about a local worker, it’s bad — if you inadvertently outed a source they’d lose their job. But in this case you can cause major, major damage to their lives and their futures.
For me, protecting the people I spoke to was my first priority. If I felt like I couldn’t do that I wouldn’t have done the story. There were attempts by the company to flush out who spoke to me. There was a lot of pressure applied in this case.
If you’re working in those conditions and you feel like you can’t speak up, and you can’t change your situation because you want to stay in Australia, you’re incredibly vulnerable. It’s an awful position people shouldn’t be in.
What impact did the story have?
In this area there’s four major restaurant businesses that were exposed or reported on. There’s Rockpool Dining Group, Dinner by Heston, Bistro Guillame, which has a handful of restaurants around Australia, and Teage Ezard, a Melbourne chef.
The biggest impact was at Rockpool. At first they said the documents we were relying on were probably doctored or faked, and there were threats of defamation. Within a few months that all changed; with follow-on reporting and extra details we were able to get out, they were forced to bring in a professional services firm to look at their books.
The Fair Work Ombudsman is now investigating all four groups. Within about four months of the story Rockpool paid back their workers $1.6million for one year’s underpayment. So that was a pretty quick turnaround where they went from saying the documents were possibly fake to paying people back some of what they’re owed.
That process has been now extended to go back another five financial years. They won’t disclose the total amount they’ve paid back to chefs over that whole period, but it looks like it could be quite a large number, getting up towards $2 million a year.
It’s worth noting as well that the chefs I’ve dealt with say the payments they’ve got have been only a fraction of what they say they’re owed. I’ve done the calculations based on they hours they’ve worked, and I think they’re right. So there’s been some restitution but maybe there could have been more. But it has been significant impact.
The other notable thing has been the crackdown on unpaid overtime. So people are working less hours at a number of these restaurants. It has long been industry practice that people are forced to work extraordinary hours for not much higher than minimum wage, but that has started to drop off.
I think the public shaming has had an effect on a lot of these businesses. Customers don’t want to go to a restaurant where they think people are being ripped off. So change has been forced on the industry that way.
Are we witnessing a moment in Australian society when workers are increasingly under threat? Or has it always been this bad and we just didn’t know about it?
I’ve spoken to academics who specialise in this area. There’s this question of whether there’s been more reporting in the last few years because there’s been so many scandals exposed and it creates its own momentum — or is something bigger going on?
It could be a bit of both, but I think there are some fundamental changes that have occurred in the last decade since the global financial crisis. We started to see wages grow at a much slower pace. What used to be a healthier regulatory system, where unions had more influence, has become diminished. So a lot of these industries, particularly in hospitality, have been largely non-union for a long time.
There’s been a big push on in Victoria through Hospo Voice, which is part of United Voice union, to start campaigning and start exposing some of this stuff. That’s had an impact as well.
We’ve also had in Australia a massive increase in the use of temporary migrant labour and we’ve got a far weaker regulatory system in the sense that the unions are much weaker, and also a slowing economy over the last decade. So you’ve got ideal conditions, I think, for there to be more wage theft
The restaurant industry has a big macho culture, long hours and that kind of stuff has been a feature of the industry for a long time. But there comes a moment when people are prepared to speak up. There’s been something of a reckoning in the past few years, with a number of these high profile people and businesses.
It’s a new phenomenon that chefs are so high profile as well.
The glamorisation of the food industry is really important in this as well. Being a chef has gone from being a working class job, and now a lot of these guys, and it is largely guys, have become celebrities. They’ve made massive fortunes, everyone watches Masterchef and all these cooking shows. There’s more of a foodie culture, there’s lots of food media around, publicity and hype. That’s something that’s become more of a thing in the last decade as well.
You and Royce have won this award together before. How does your reporting relationship work?
Royce and I have worked together probably for the last seven or eight years on a lot of different projects. We work very closely — he’s on a long service leave at the moment, out of the country.
On bigger projects we divide the work up. Sometimes on projects it’s more my work, sometimes it’s more his work. The issues around wage theft or underpayment has been something we’ve reported on really for the last four years. The hospitality focus has been the last year or so. But we’d previously reported a lot about farm workers, again it’s another area where there’s even worse exploitation of migrant workers. Many workers in that case are overstay holiday visas, they work on farms for next to nothing.
The award we won a few years ago was about sub-standard agreements between the Shoppies union and the big major fast food and retailers companies, which left workers again paid below the award. Workers on those agreements were being underpaid hundreds of millions of dollars a year. That has been rectified to a good degree since then.
The stories have all been quite different but all related to issues around wages, fairness, the law and underpayment.
What made you want to be a journalist?
Growing up in Melbourne I used to read newspapers at home, and watch the news. We’d get both papers during the day, there was the afternoon Herald Sun which my dad would get, we’d also get The Age. I was really attracted to The Age. To me it was the most interesting newspaper, it was something I really enjoyed reading. At first I read sport, then as I got older I got interested in news. I remember being in high school and thinking it would be an interesting job to work at The Age. So my ambition was to be a journalist, but really to work at The Age.
I’ve worked at other places before I got to The Age, but that was always the goal. Before that I was at the Financial Review as a trainee. One of the first times I read the Financial Review, I think, was when I worked there! And I worked at The Independent in London. But I was always really interested in working at The Age. That was my motivation.
My first day at The Age, it was in the old brown brick Spencer Street building, known as the Spencer Street Soviet, I think for its style and maybe sometimes the politics of some of the reporters who worked there. I remember coming out after my first day feeling really flat, and I realised it was because the building basically didn’t have windows. The lack of natural light gave me a really flat, almost depressed feeling! So that’s what I remember from my first day. It’s been a really good experience, but that was a terrible building. Unless you need to survive an atomic attack.
What are you most proud of about the stories you’ve told?
These stories have been a real privilege to tell. The people who have spoken to me for a lot of these stories we’ve been talking about have been incredibly brave, taken incredible risks, and put faith in me. To be able to do justice to that in some way has been a powerful thing.
It’s been an opportunity to speak for people who don’t have power, who don’t have a voice, and who really have quite limited rights. And to see some kind of justice come out of that, maybe not all the justice that is deserved, but some justice — it’s the thing I’ve been most proud of.
What’s your message to Australians about why quality journalism needs their support?
The kind of journalism that can change things, expose things, hold people to account, can only exist with the support of readers, people who subscribe to publications, or make contributions, or are involved or engaged. It’s vitally important on the business side, but also the support you get from readers in messages on social media, calls, emails. The tips we get from readers, it’s the only way we can do our job. They’re the people who make it all possible. It’s vitally important, their role in what we do.
The best thing about receiving this award?
It’s a nice recognition, I’d be lying to say otherwise. We get a real buzz out of it. The main thing, the reason you do your work is for the journalism, to get at things, understand things and expose things, but it’s nice when there’s recognition.
Ben Schneiders is an investigative journalist at The Age with a focus on industrial relations, business and politics. He has written extensively on the underpayment of workers, political corruption and on the labour movement. Ben is a previous Walkley Award winning journalist and has worked at The Age since 2006 in roles including senior writer and workplace editor. Before joining The Age, Ben worked at the Independent on Sunday in London. He started his career in newspapers in 2003 at The Australian Financial Review.
Follow Ben on Twitter: @benschneiders
SUPPORTED BY: MEAA, Unions NSW, AI Group, ACTU, UTS, AustralianSuper
Philanthropic support in memory of Emeritus Professor Alan Knight.
