A Hospitality Gig App Faces Questions Over Contractor Classification and Unpaid Superannuation
A hospitality gig-work app operating across Australia and the United States is under scrutiny after a worker reported he was never paid superannuation — the compulsory retirement savings contributions employers must make on behalf of workers in Australia — for shifts booked through the platform across 15 separate companies.
Supp, launched in Melbourne in 2017 by Kate and Cameron Reid, owners of Lune Croissanterie, describes itself as a "jobs marketplace" where hospitality businesses advertise available shifts to workers at an hourly rate. The Reids retain a financial stake in the company but no longer sit on its board. The platform claims use by approximately 15,000 venues and 200,000 workers across Australia and the US, with operations in New York and Los Angeles. Its app is marketed on the Apple App Store as the "#1 hospitality jobs app" and on Google Play as a tool used by thousands of workers and businesses from the restaurant, cafe, and events sectors.
The platform operates on a straightforward commercial mechanic: Supp adds a 12% surcharge as its service fee on top of the shift rate and provides workers with payment advice and end-of-financial-year summaries. Crucially, Supp requires workers to hold their own Australian Business Number (ABN) and classifies them as independent contractors rather than casual employees of the hospitality businesses that hire them.
That classification is now under pressure. Worker Daniel McBurnie, who was hired as an individual contractor for 15 different companies through Supp, investigated whether he was entitled to superannuation for shifts obtained through the platform from 2021. McBurnie said he was never paid superannuation for any of his Supp shifts and that the app had no mechanism for businesses to collect, or for him to provide, the information necessary to facilitate those payments. He worked across 15 separate hospitality businesses during this period.
The legal framework here is consequential. Under the Fair Work Act, sham contracting — defined as misrepresenting an employment relationship as an independent contracting relationship — is unlawful and can attract penalties of up to $546,000 for large businesses. Separately, the Australian Tax Office (ATO) holds that independent contractors paid mainly for their labour are entitled to receive superannuation. These two regulatory threads converge directly on Supp's operating model: if workers classified as contractors are in fact engaged in what the law regards as an employment relationship, both the classification and the absence of superannuation payments become legally actionable.
Supp's chief executive, Jordan Murray, has rejected and denied any suggestions of misrepresentation of the working relationship arranged through the platform.
The broader context is the regulatory tightening around gig-work classification in Australia. The distinction between independent contractor and employee carries obligations that differ across tax law, superannuation, and workplace protections, and platforms that build their models around contractor status face potential challenges on each of these fronts at once. The ATO's position that contractors paid mainly for their labour are entitled to superannuation means that even if a contractor classification holds, the superannuation obligation may not disappear. McBurnie's account, if representative of the broader worker base, points to a systemic gap rather than an isolated administrative oversight.
The structural detail matters. McBurnie's reporting that the platform lacked any mechanism for superannuation information exchange between workers and hiring businesses raises a design-level question: whether a platform that orchestrates the entire payment flow for a shift can credibly position itself as neutral on compliance with entitlements tied to that payment flow. Supp collects its 12% surcharge, issues payment advice, and produces financial-year summaries, which means it sits squarely in the payment chain. The absence of a superannuation mechanism within that chain raises the question of where the obligation to facilitate compliance falls — on the platform, on the hiring businesses, or on the workers themselves.
Murray's denial of misrepresentation sets up the likely contest. The Fair Work Act's sham-contracting provisions, the ATO's superannuation rules for labour-based contractors, and the testimony of a worker who cycled through 15 companies without receiving superannuation are the three pressure points. How regulators, the platform, and the businesses that rely on it navigate those pressures will shape not just Supp's operating model but the broader template for hospitality gig-work classification in Australia.
