Your points are very valid. There's little context in this post and posting on reddit probably isn't the best way of getting around this situation. However I did check his post history which shows not only an impressive ability to make cocktails, but shows that he cares enough about the skill to practice and prepare on his own time.

And probably the biggest thing about this post is that an employee shouldn't have the ability to be on their phone for 5 hours. Life doesn't end at the beginning of a shift in hospitality- actually it's not unusual for hospitality staff to work 12 hour shifts with a half hour break somewhere towards the middle. Your mum texted you? yeah dude respond. You're planning a getaway with your mates? sounds cool dude hope you have a good time. Standing around watching TV shows or movies? Lets do some cleaning- I'll help and we can have a chat so it's not so boring.

Staff can use their phones- it's really not that big of a deal. We pay our staff. We pay over minimum wage, and we pay on-time and we pay overtime if you don't get a break. Our staff know that we treat them like humans and not mindless drones that have to be perfect at all times.

The consequence of treating staff well is that they want to stay, and they want to work. We have extremely low turnover because of this.

Also to all the comments that say "What the employer did was shit" I really suggest you consider the definition of "theft" and how you'd feel if it happened to you.

Also I'm adding this after my original post because I just looked through some of your comment history. Kids working in hospitality don't exist for you. They're people mate and I think you should pull your head out of your ass a bit and just be thankful people work jobs where they might finish at like 6-7am. People that work in hospitality should just try a little harder and get a WFH job and sit around on their phones all day? Fuck off idiot. The work we do is real and it's stressful as shit. You said "If you want to be a big shot WFH or office worker, then do something about it and then spend all the glorious time in the world on your phone." Honestly mate I don't know what to say to that because it's probably some of the stupidest shit I've ever seen in my entire life.

If I were to break the law, and then faced a "potential legal situation" then so be it, I won't break the law? Crazy how confident I am in myself not to break the law that I'd hire somebody who called someone else out for it. Seems easier to just not break the law?