700 Hungry Jacks staff in Tasmania.
$665 000 back paid – almost $1000 per worker.
That’s how much the Federal Magistrates Court determined an outrageous SDA deal had cost fast food workers in 2011.
This secretive deal was never ratified so it didn’t overwrite the Minimum Rates Award in place in Tasmania. That mistake by SDA meant the workers had a legal right to the minimum Award rather than the sell out deal which had stripped their workplace rights. In his judgement, Federal Magistrate Lucev said:
It’s worth reading that again – “it is common cause that if the SDA agreement had in fact been certified, Hungry Jack’s would not have contravened any of the industrial instruments of the Regulations.”
In other words, the rights to the stolen pay, overtime, public holiday loadings, casual loadings and the like would not have existed if the SDA agreement had been certified.
And there is the rub. Everywhere else in Australia, the SDA has certified their sell out deals with Hungry Jacks costing low paid fast food workers millions of dollars every year.
It is well past time that all the sell out SDA deals be terminated and the millions of dollars a year taken from Hungry Jacks workers be returned. Further, it is time the SDA and Hungry Jacks own up to what they have done and compensate the thousands of workers who have had their minimum wages cut by these sell out deals.