Just one month after fellow celebrity chef George Colambaris was found to have underpaid staff by a whopping $2.6 million, dessert mogul Adriano Zumbo has been accused of ripping off his pastry chefs.
Employees from the Zumbo chain say they’re being scammed out of superannuation payments and missing out on overtime, despite selling cakes at $300 a pop.
“Basically, on my payslip, it says that I’m being paid to Host Super and my policy number is 123456789. So there’s money being taken out of my pay every week, but I don’t have a policy number, I don’t have an account with Host Super,” Sydney worker names Samantha told A Current Affair on Tuesday.
“It’s not fair. It’s really not fair. How can you expect these amazing cakes to be produced? How can you expect the staff to love what they’re doing if you’re destroying everything they have? You’re destroying their passion.”
The young workers also claim they haven’t been paid overtime since a raft of changes swept through the business in January, which Australian Council of Trade Unions president Ged Kearney characterised as “wage theft”.
Zumbo, who many know from his appearances alongside Colambaris on Masterchef, initially denied any knowledge of the discrepancies to A Current Affair though later wrote in a letter he was saddened “some of my current and former staff did not share their apparent concerns relating to their working conditions with me or our HR department.”
Yesterday, the former host of Zumbo’s Just Desserts appeared to get some when an Instagram video of him playfully kicking the air in a commercial kitchen was stormed with angry comments from disgruntled fans.
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