An early print deadline has been blamed for the “not ideal” decision to feature TV chef George Calombaris on the cover of Nine newspapers’ Good Weekend magazine, two days after his restaurant chain was revealed to have underpaid workers by $7.8m.
The Good Weekend hit the stands on Saturday morning with a full cover portrait of Calombaris, with words arranged around his head to form a halo.
The feature – on chefs, mental health and overwork – explored the restaurateur’s use of meditation to cope with stress after his wage underpayment scandal was self-reported two years ago, estimated at $2.6m.
“It saved me at a point in my life where I hit darkness,” the halo read.
On Thursday, the Fair Work Ombudsman announced that it and Calombaris’s Made Establishment company had agreed that the company had underpaid staff by three times that amount, totalling $7.8m.
In an Instagram post, the editor of the Good Weekend, Katrina Strickland, conceded the timing of the cover was not ideal, but said this was because of an early print deadline.
The magazine had been sent to print on Friday last week, and the details of the full underpayment was made public only on Thursday.
Previously, Calombaris had admitted in April 2017 to underpayments of $2.6m stretching back to 2011. On Friday, the Age reported that two more workers had come forward.
Excuse me @SMH Where's your sense of fairness? How about a cover photo of Calombaris' ripped off workers, they're the real victims in this story#WageTheft pic.twitter.com/GVjtEoNP8X
— Thomas Costa (@ThomasJCosta) July 20, 2019
“I know I know, George Calombaris on the cover,” Strickland wrote. “Not ideal – the perils of early print deadlines.
“But this @goodweekendmag cover story is not about George per se – it’s about an important issue in the restaurant industry: chefs, mental health, untimely deaths, and attempts at last to do something about it.
“And yes, George talks about how meditation helped him deal with his public shaming over wage theft a couple of years ago. He’ll need more now that the figure has blown out to three times what he’d previously admitted – and how he is now trying to get his staff into it.”
Strickland added in a statement that the feature had been updated.
“The current issue of Good Weekend was sent to print late last week, ahead of the Fair Work ruling. While we have updated the online version of the cover story to reflect recent events, the story itself is about a much broader topic – mental health – of which George was a part of but not the sole focus.”
The feature also involved interviews with chef Jane Strode, the widow of fellow chef Jeremy Strode, and Newcastle chef Mal Meiers.
On Saturday morning, the digital editions of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age ran the story on their front pages, but with the image and headline referencing Strode rather than Calombaris.
The feature, which described Calombaris at a meditation session “in Melbourne’s leafy suburb of Kew” and at home “in the privacy of his Toorak mansion”, addressed the stress he experienced in 2017 when his restaurant first self-reported the $2.6m underpayment, and he was charged with assault after a dispute at an A-League match.
“He later won an appeal against his conviction, and paid staff entitlements in full, but the backlash was forceful and swift,” the feature read. “Getting hammered in the press, he struggled to cope.”
Online, the sentence “paid staff their full entitlements”, was changed to read “said he’d paid back his staff entitlements in full”.
In the piece, author Luke Benedictus questioned whether this was “a PR move” from Calombaris, before concluding that it was not.
“Sceptics might question if all this is a PR move from a man whose public image is still tarnished,” he wrote. “But Calombaris – not someone who tends to do anything half-cocked – comes across like a man on a mission … Fuelling his meditation zeal is a belated recognition that the old ways of running a restaurant are defunct.”
The feature said employees at Calombaris’s restaurant chain now had their working hours capped at 40 hours a week, and that management “is instructed to keep a close eye on the personal welfare of their teams”.
