Around the country, the bosses’ attack on penalty rates continues. The owners of an Adelaide restaurant and bar, the Bombay Bicycle Club, are the latest to nominate themselves as the face of this anti-worker campaign.

The club’s owners commissioned and mounted a plaque outside the restaurant condemning penalty rates and then fired up their Facebook page to call those who support penalty pay “idiots”.

The plaque, gold leafed and expensive looking – befitting the club’s British India style decor – condemned public holiday pay for hospitality workers, a rate 2.75 times the base wage. It claims that if the club were to pay its employees this rate, it would have to charge 2.75 times as much for all items on the menu.

The social media furor that followed resulted in the plaque’s removal. The Bombay Bicycle Club has “single handedly proved why we need trade unions”, said one. “Surely”, said another, “a pub raking in the profits with 32 poker machines wouldn’t be stupid enough to complain about having to pay penalty rates to their workers”. Yet another suggested wages could be paid from the restaurant’s obviously sizable plaque budget.

It’s a no-brainer that the owners of a colonialism-themed restaurant are arseholes, but bosses across Australia are coordinating an attack on penalty rates and wages generally. The Bombay Bicycle Club has just been stupid enough to openly say (and engrave in faux marble) what the rest of them think.