Restaurants fined for stiffing workers

A company has been fined more than $116,000 for deliberately underpaying foreign employees at two Japanese fast food outlets in Brisbane.

WY Pty Ltd, was recently penalised in the Federal Circuit Court for underpaying a man and woman working as kitchen hands at the company's Hanaichi outlets at Westfield Chermside by $18,491 in 2015.

The Taiwanese employees, who speak limited English, were in Australia on 417 working holiday visas at the time and were employed after responding to advertisements on Mandarin-language websites.

The company's director and part-owner Chong Yew Chua was also fined $20,000, while the company's former internal payroll and account manager, Ning Yuan Fu, was fined $7000.

The court heard the employees were paid less than the minimum wage and were not paid penalty rates, and that WY Pty Ltd also made unlawful deductions from their wages as "bonds" for their uniforms.

The workers have now been back-paid in full.

The fines were handed down after the company, which has since sold the Chermside outlets but still operates a similar restaurant in Indooroopilly, was warned by the Fair Work Ombudsman in 2012 about underpaying employees.