“There’s nothing like getting back for getting better.” It’s the main slogan of a campaign currently being run by Victoria’s workplace safety authority. The campaign is based on the lie that injured workers don’t really want to go back to work, that if only they were more “positive” and “proactive”, they would get back on the job sooner. The reality is that when you get injured at work, your boss holds all the cards. Azlan McLennan tells his story.
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I worked as a bartender at the Edinburgh Castle Hotel in Melbourne for nearly two years. The Castle is a fairly typical pub in Brunswick. The boss also owns three other similarly uninspiring, overpriced bars in trendy inner city ghettos.
The Castle is marketed as “Brunswick’s longest standing pub”. It spruiks its “family friendly” environment, targeting young middle class families. They’ve even won awards for being a favourite in such circles.
Last year, I suffered a serious back injury while working there and began receiving workers compensation entitlements. The pub was forced to pay me my average weekly earnings as I slowly returned to my pre-injury work hours while recovering. That’s when the bullying started.
Over the Christmas period, management left me off the roster for a week. No problem, I thought. I used the time to fly to Brisbane to visit my sick father. I got back to find I hadn’t been paid. When I questioned why, “Because you took a holiday” was the answer.
I reported this breach to the insurance company while the boss played dumb. After more than two months of stalling, he was finally forced to pay me what I was owed. No apologies, though.
During this time, it became clear to me that his strategy was to make working for him unbearable so I would quit. A manager revealed to me that the pub’s accountant, speaking of me, instructed her to “help him as little as possible”.
When my Workcover payments eventually stopped, my hours were immediately reduced. My father died shortly after this, and I went to Brisbane to bury him. The boss used this “holiday” as an opportunity to cut my Sunday shifts altogether. Anyone who works in hospitality knows how important Sunday penalty rates are. They can mean the difference between eating or not.
Apparently, the Castle’s “family friendly” ethos doesn’t extend to its employees when a family members dies.
After this new low, a sympathetic manager suggested I look for another job. They told me that the boss was planning to get rid of me but had to wait until a few months after my Workcover payments stopped, so as to “not look dodgy in Fair Work Australia’s eyes”.
When I confronted him about this, he sent me home and fired me by text message the next morning.
This kind of discrimination is not an anomaly in the hospitality industry; rather, it’s a blueprint for how to run a business. Make profits at all costs and stomp on anyone who questions your bloated sense of entitlement. Let no person stand in the way of your God-given right to make a buck, least of all a worker asserting their rights.
The system we live under of course rewards this kind of sociopathic behaviour. The “independent umpire”, the Business Council of Australia and their loyal servants in Liberal party, the ALP and a cynical union bureacracy ensure workers always come last.
Young workers, in particular, have next to no rights. In place of basic solidarity and unionism are fear, competition and the promise of advancement if they too are willing to give up on any idea fairness. The only way our side can turn this around is to rebuild a culture of militant rank and file unionism in our workplaces.
