“[New employees would come in, realise how bad it was, and] be like, ‘Why don’t you leave?’ and we would be like, ‘Well, we can’t’.”
“They knew they could treat people like shit because no one was going to have a confrontation with them,” said another chef. “They knew we were on a sponsorship, and if we said anything, they [could] fire us, and well … what could we do?”
Lawyers for Merivale have denied the company targeted migrant workers, stating the allegation was “baseless and offensive”.
Merivale’s overseas recruitment drive was necessary to combat industry-wide staff shortages, human resources representative Ash Campbell told Hospitality magazine in 2018. The company has also recruited from countries including Malaysia, Indonesia and Nepal.
Campbell, along with executive chefs Dan Hong (Mr Wong, Queen Chow), Ben Greeno (Fred’s, Hotel Paddington) and former executive chef Nick Imbragen (ex-El Loco), travelled to Mexico City to oversee the series of one-on-one interviews and mystery-box cooking challenges. There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing on the part of Hong, Greeno or Imbragen.
Successful chefs signed a $US8500 ($13,000) contract with Texas-based recruitment firm Alliance Abroad International. The contract said the $13,000 for their Cultural Support Program included “relocation support for a period of four years”, but chefs said support was limited to a brief hostel stay and visa processing. It did not include flights. The total cost is more than four times the price of the $3115 skilled visa for chefs, according to the Department of Home Affairs. Alliance Abroad said its “comprehensive orientation program” also included pre-departure workshops and arrival briefings.
But when the chefs arrived in Australia, they said it was a far cry from the glossy images they were promised in Mexico.
“When we arrived in Sydney, it was just three days in a hostel, and then you had to find a place to live,” said Santos. “It was really hard to secure a lease because of no background, no bank account and no help.”
The $13,000 fee was automatically deducted from their bank accounts during the first 18 months in Australia.
Most were employed as a chef de partie and paid minimum wage, starting at around $54,000 per annum in 2018.
It was a “life-changing amount of money” compared to what they were earning in Mexico, said another chef. Then he did the math: if they worked between 13 and 15 hours each day, without paid overtime, their salary would be less than minimum wage.
The other chefs scoffed at the suggestion: “Well, if we worked that many hours, it would be just like Mexico,” one wrote. “The contract states the maximum number of hours is 52 per week … [and] it’s too late to get upset, anyway.”
In reality, the long hours were brutal, sometimes stretching up to and beyond 52 hours a week at restaurants such as Totti’s Bondi, Uccello, and Mr Wong, said sponsored staff. It’s alleged they were only paid for 38.
Former Paddington and Totti’s Bondi chefs said they often worked without breaks, despite senior staff recording – or asking them to record – breaks on their timesheets.
Alliance Abroad International had misled them, alleged three chefs, two of whom suspended support program payments within the first year. Where was the competitive salary, the work-life-balance, and agency support when things went wrong?
Alliance Abroad global marketing director Anna Downes said “a small number of chefs raised concerns regarding rosters and overtime”, which were then escalated to Merivale’s human resources team.
“[Merivale] advised us that the matters were being addressed internally,” Downes said.
“Any suggestion that we condone or facilitate the mistreatment of migrant workers stands in direct opposition to the values, safeguards, and global standards that underpin everything we do. We strongly reject any claim that we knowingly facilitated such exploitation.”
Merivale has denied knowledge of any such complaints, and maintains the company complied with its legal obligations to employees.
Mr Wong, the two-hatted jewel in Merivale’s hospitality crown, was considered the “worst” place to work in The Ivy precinct, said a female former chef. In another group chat of sponsored chefs, they described Mr Wong as a monster of a venue – constantly busy, with a weekly roster which sometimes had chefs working double shifts most days.
For her, that meant arriving at 10:30am, taking a break at about 5pm for three hours, then returning until 2am. She said staff slept side by side on daybeds in the break room between shifts.
“The sofas were super old,” she said of the couches. “You just had to find a space and sleep next to someone.”
Merivale said staff rooms were often used by staff to nap during their breaks or before or after their shifts. “Couches are provided within staff rooms for amenity and comfort,” Merivale’s lawyers said in a statement. “To link staff who nap in the staffroom to some form of nefarious behaviour by Merivale towards its employees is absurd.”
Those who struggled with speaking or understanding English, or used different cooking methods, were allegedly mocked or laughed at. Zavaleta recalled some chefs referring to their migrant counterparts as “the Mexicans”.
“I would remember listening to one of the team leaders regarding us [as], ‘the Mexicans’, he said. “The Mexicans should do this, the Mexicans should do that.”
The chef from Mr Wong said they rarely complained: “We were all fighting for the permanent residency [PR] … and there was an implicit understanding that if you wanted PR you needed to say yes to everything,” she said.
Permanent residency became the “golden ticket,” incentivising staff to keep quiet, work hard and rise through the ranks, said another former chef who worked at fine-dining Merivale restaurants such as Uccello. “We saw permanent residency as a prize Merivale gave you – a prize you had to earn.”
It fostered an environment of fierce competition, he said, describing some kitchens in The Ivy precinct as a “dog fight” where chefs had to prove they were better than their colleagues by shouting at them.
“It was the hardest time of my life,” said another chef who spent time at a hatted restaurant in The Ivy precinct. He was used to the cut-throat world of fine-dining kitchens, having worked at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Mexico. But nothing compared to Merivale.
Chefs estimate that more than half of their Mexican colleagues left the company before receiving permanent residency. Merivale has denied knowledge of any migrant chefs returning to their country of origin due to workplace conditions.
One chef, a single mother-of-four recruited from South-East Asia, said the long hours and low pay eventually pushed her to find an alternative workplace willing to sponsor her.
“I explained to my kids that we can’t go back, and you need to fight for it, to stay here … [but] it was too much,” she said. She remembered the school events she missed, and the time she couldn’t leave work to comfort her injured child on an ambulance ride to the hospital.
“I just worked, worked, worked, all the time … but it wasn’t enough to [cover the cost] of the kids,” she said. After tax, rent and the Alliance Abroad fee were deducted from her weekly salary, she estimated she was left with around $300.
Alliance Abroad and Merivale are preparing to return to Mexico for another recruitment drive. This month, the agency emailed the Mexican chefs they’d recruited for Merivale in 2017 and 2018 to request testimonials that would “encourage other talented chefs in Mexico to follow in [their] footsteps”.
In late 2019, hundreds of staff who alleged they had been systematically underpaid for years by the hospitality giant filed a class-action lawsuit. When migrant workers were given the option to sign onto the lawsuit and receive compensation, many declined for fear of losing their sponsorship, despite the promise of confidentiality.
Alliance Abroad said it was unaware of the class action lawsuit until it became public through media reporting.
Merivale agreed to settle the $19 million class action without admitting fault in November. Lawyers acting for the company said Merivale has at all times vigorously denied underpaying its staff, and maintains the claims are false. The settlement prevents any signatory from making statements to the contrary.
But new documents show some staff are still being told to work more than full-time hours.
Internal emails reveal that in September, Merivale executives were forcing full-time staff to work 45 hours per week by warning to “pull lists of staff members” who were not hitting those hours.
A payslip from May shows a staff member being paid for a 38-hour week, despite a separate time card showing they registered 60 hours that same week. Some staff earning more than the award of $78,000 do not get any overtime until they have worked a sixth or seventh day in a row.
The staff member, who worked shifts of up to 14 hours, alleges they had 60 hours squeezed into five days.
Merivale denied these claims, stating its “employees receive pay that meets or exceeds the relevant award entitlements”.
But the punishing work conditions took a heavy psychological toll, fuelling depression and anxiety among chefs.
“Every day felt like a test,” Santos said. “People [would] tell you you’re wrong, you’re shit, whatever, so you started to [adopt] that kind of mentality.”
It took a plea from a concerned colleague for management to cut down their hours. For some chefs, conditions slowly improved after the COVID-pandemic. The staffing shortage had become dire, and Merivale fought to retain staff with promotions, shorter work weeks and the occasional overtime payment.
Some venues became known among employees as “less complicated” than others, said one chef from Totti’s Bondi, who received regular annual pay rises in line with the award.
Among the chefs who stuck it out and received permanent residency, one said he is traumatised, some suffer from ongoing physical injuries, and another is in therapy.
But, free from Merivale, they are happy.
“I’m glad I’m here,” said Zavaleta, who left the company in 2023. “[I just wish] they had told me: ‘Hey, we’re going to treat you like shit. We’re going to give you shit. But in five or six years, you’re going to become a resident of this beautiful country.’
“F–k it, I’ll take it, I’m down. But they didn’t deliver it like that. It was all smoke-screens and make-believe.”
