Exclusive: Former workers of a popular cafe in Melbourne’s affluent suburb of Toorak say they are yet to see tens of thousands of dollars they are owed in wages, despite winning a court battle against the owner six months ago.
Celeste Freeman told 9news.com.au she was initially grateful to get a job at the Monkey Bean cafe when she moved from Western Australia to Melbourne back in 2018.
With a reputation for good coffee and glowing four-star reviews online, the place is a local institution.
Former employee Celeste Freeman is owed $31,500 by the Monkey Bean cafe after she was underpaid for years. (Supplied: Celeste Freeman)
The pay was $20 per hour. Freeman ended up working as a casual employee at the cafe for more than three years.
As well as being paid less than the award rate, Freeman was never paid casual loading, weekend penalty rates, or for any overtime hours she worked.
“I didn’t know about any of these things,” Freeman said of the award and extra penalty rates she was supposed to be getting.
What finally triggered the alarm bells for Freeman was the superannuation.
While her weekly payslip stated she was being paid superannuation, it turned out this wasn’t the case.
Freeman had never thought to check her superannuation account directly to make sure the money was actually being deposited.
It was a colleague who realised what was happening.Â
“They said, ‘Oh, I checked my super and it hasn’t been paid’,” Freeman said.
“That was not good. That was when it all started to fall apart.”
Colleague Connor Davidson told 9news.com.au he confronted the cafe’s owner, Jason Thomas O’Loughlin, about the missing super.
Davidson, who worked at the Monkey Bean cafe as a casual for two years while studying at university, said he knew there were extra penalty rates he should have also been getting, but after working in hospitality for years, he was not surprised to be missing out.
“I’ve worked in hospitality since I was 13 … until I got a corporate job outside of uni, and obviously it’s quite rampant with underpaying – I was sort of used to it,” he said.
But when he found out about the missing superannuation payments, he was angry.
“At that point, I honestly was quite upset with him, and so I tried to push back on penalty rates, lack of proper award rates, but I got nowhere with that.”
Despite payslips stating superannuation would be paid into Monkey Bean employee accounts, it was not (Supplied: Connor Davidson)
Freeman and Davidson quit their jobs and went to the Young Workers Centre, whose lawyers attempted to negotiate with O’Loughlin, the cafe owner, on their behalf.
The Young Workers Centre calculated that Freeman was owed $31,500 in unpaid wages and entitlements and Davidson around $8000.
“When I saw that sum, that was life-changing,” Freeman said.
“That $30,000 that I didn’t have, I really could have used that.”
Young Workers Centre director Paloma Cole said their lawyers were forced to pursue legal action after O’Loughlin refused to engage in the process.
They took the case to the Magistrates’ Court of Victoria.
After O’Loughlin failed to supply the court with any information or file defences to the claims, the court issued separate judgments in December 2024 and January 2025 awarding Davidson and Freeman their disputed wages.
In July, the court imposed a penalty of $50,000 on Kelyon Pty Ltd, a company of which O’Loughlin is the sole shareholder and director, and a further $10,000 against O’Loughlin himself.
O’Loughlin did not respond to multiple requests from 9news.com.au for comment before publication.
Cole said the Monkey Bean Cafe was still running and operating as usual, but claimed it had yet to pay the $100,000 it owed in penalties and wages.
If O’Loughlin did not pay up, the next step was for the Young Workers Centre to help Freeman and Davidson get the Victoria’s Sheriff’s Office to enforce the court order, she said.
The judgement against the cafe owner and his company were breaches of civil provisions and did not amount to wage theft, which was made a criminal offence in Victoria in 2020 and with federal laws in January this year.
‘A common issue for young workers’
Cole said that, in her experience, it was alarmingly common for young workers to be underpaid.
Research conducted by Melbourne University’s law school, released in July, found that a third of young workers were being paid about $10 an hour under the minimum wage.
Around 36 per cent of young workers were forbidden to take compulsory breaks, while 24 per cent were not paid superannuation, the study found.
“I would expect that those rates would be even worse in the hospitality industry, because it’s dominated by young workers in frontline work, as well as international or migrant workers – two particularly vulnerable cohorts to exploitation,” Cole said of the figures.
Cole said there needed to be more funding for the Fair Work Ombudsman to address the issue, but also funding for community legal centres like the Young Workers Centre to help represent more clients.
Freeman said she hoped other workers in the hospitality industry would learn from her story.
Her advice is simple: “Speak up and talk about your pay.”
As well as checking their correct award and penalty rates on the Fair Work Commission’s website, employees should also make sure to check their superannuation balances, Davidson added.
“Check your super, I would have found out so much earlier if I had just logged in every now and then,” he said.