Brodie's death a warning to small business

JEN VUK
December 24, 2009

SADLY, it was an irony lost on the young woman working behind the counter of the busy cafe on Hawthorn's cosmopolitan Glenferrie Road. Cafe Vamp was its name, but Brodie Rae Constance Panlock was no femme fatale. Described by her family as a determined young woman ''who set goals to achieve'', which included earning enough money in order to travel, the 19-year-old was also searching for "approval and acceptance".

Sad, too, was that few, if any, of the cafe's steady stream of customers noticed a static in the air - the kind left behind in the wake of a hurtful comment - whenever Brodie shared a shift with Rhys MacAlpine, and manager and erstwhile lover Nicholas Smallwood, or her brittle emotional state after an ''almost daily routine of inappropriate pressure at work''.

But saddest of all was that no one was there on the night in September 2006 when a distraught Brodie took herself to the top of a nearby multi-storey car park and jumped off. Three days later, ''the little ray of sunshine'', as Brodie was described by co-worker Meghan Chester, was dead.

During the inquest into the Brodie's death held earlier this month, The Age's Helen Westerman wrote that workplace bullying was ''a small-business problem''. Westerman briefly singled out an industry where ''intolerable behaviour is (often) glossed over, or even celebrated'' a la a well-known, if tarnished, UK celebrity chef.

The one and the same industry that, in Australia, employs the largest number of young and inexperienced workers. And with the numbers of school leavers and students on summer break currently knocking on the doors of restaurants, cafes and bars across the nation, there's one less excuse for complacency with our cafe lattes.

Here's another. A WorkSafe survey undertaken in May found nearly one in five workers reported being bullied, with the incidence of reported bullying rising to 19 per cent from 12 per cent in 2007. And yet a workplace summary, released in 2006, found hospitality employees were less likely than others to know if their organisation had a bullying policy or to have been informed of one. Few knew about reporting procedures for bullying, or sought help from internal or external sources.

This was supported by a following survey of 1600 young workers, which found that they were ''less likely to be consulted on safety in the workplace, don't have the confidence to raise issues, may not understand or know their rights and alarmingly don't consider workplace safety as important as road or public safety''.

Alarming is right. The hospitality industry remains frighteningly accident prone, especially for the young. In Victoria alone, those aged 15 to 24 experience the highest proportion of work-related injury, occurring mainly in food retail, such as fish shops and takeaway-food shops, cafes and restaurants.

While many hospitality employers have good, sound systems in place to ensure their young charges' first experience in the workforce is a positive one, many more don't. Of all industries, the hospitality sector consistently generates the most complaints, including underpayment of minimum hourly rates, penalty rates, weekend and public holiday loadings and failure to expediently issue play slips, as Craig Bildstien, a spokesman for the Fair Work Ombudsman, tells me.

Attempting to address this disparity, in February this year WorkSafe launched a national education campaign aimed at young hospitality workers and their employers. Fair Work, too, regularly runs campaigns in schools and universities, as well as dropping leaflets at popular venues.

The message, says Bildstien, is that ''the best defence for a young worker against being taken advantage of is to know their workplace rights''. That's certainly true enough, but is it good enough?

In May last year, coroner Peter White found that Panlock's ''low self-esteem, age and inexperience'' rendered her ''emotionally vulnerable''. With such a trifecta acting against her, being aware of her rights would have been little ammunition against the barrage of an ''unbearable level of humiliation''.

The fallout from this case will be felt not only by a family but by all involved, with the lawyer of Cafe Vamp's owner, Marc Luis da Cruz (who admitted he felt terrible about what happened) indicating his client would leave the hospitality industry after 20 years.

And yet much of what happened to Brodie over the course of her employment at Cafe Vamp from early 2005 to late 2006 must have occurred within earshot of others, too, if not within sight.

We come across it often enough. The ribbing, jibes and mucking around that sometimes masquerade as camaraderie. There can be a very fine line between having a joke and being the butt of one.

Brodie Panlock may have been easy prey, but this young, insecure woman's experience has exposed the erroneous idea embodied in hospitality's unspoken rule that what happens inside the kitchen or behind the counter can stay there. The tragedy is that she never lived to see what she had achieved.

For help or information visit beyondblue.org.au, call Suicide Helpline Victoria on 1300 651 251 or Lifeline on 131 11

Source: The Age