Jenna Price | Hospitality workers should be protected like retail staff in NSW

And it's about loving your children so much you will do just about anything for them. That includes embarrassing the hell out of them.

Our working lives matter. Part of loving your kids is about helping them grow up, making sure they have some experience of what work looks like because you are a long-time working.

Ours each worked in a little local supermarket for a year or two before leaving school. In this day and age, that's probably considered child abuse, steering them into the workforce at an early age, ripe for exploitation.

But if you work in retail, you learn to deal with conflict - some of it's reasonable (did you scan that twice?), some of it is about ensuring your boss pays you properly, and some of it, particularly from customers, is sheer unfathomable abuse.

The good news is that in NSW, at least, abusing retail workers will soon be a crime. Punishment will be graduated, starting with fines.

Three new offences will be included in the NSW Crimes Act, making it a crime to assault, throw a missile at, stalk, harass or intimidate a retail worker at work.

Even if no physical harm is caused, the perpetrator could face a maximum penalty of four years' prison. So so good.

But let's not stop there.

The national secretary of the United Workers Union Tim Kennedy is calling on all states and territories to enact these kinds of penalties to protect hospitality workers too.

"The issue of abuse isn't just confined to retail. If this is what it takes to change behaviour and make sure there is a proper duty of care in the labour market, then that's what we need to do."

As Kennedy points out, hospitality workers work in environments with the service of alcohol.

"For most young people, their first engagement with the labour market is often in retail or hospitality and poor behaviour reflects badly on everyone," he said.

I'm sure he also includes some retail employers in his definition of poor behaviour.

And where do we find quite a lot of poor behaviour? Your local hotel.

I do not have pubs in my family history. We didn't drink much and although we had a pub up the road, Mum and Dad wanted us to eat at home altogether.

As I got older, it became clear to me that Australians love their pubs. So, I got used to them. They smelled bad. The food was often appalling. And the culture, erk.

When my kids wanted to work in pubs, I wasn't all that pleased. Still, good money, regular shifts. But it turns out the culture sucked.

One of my daughters came home from work one day, complaining that her manager would never do anything about the customers who abused her verbally, who pinched her on the bum, or worse.

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One in particular had insulted her, slapped her, continued to harass her. She called home, crying.

Yes, we suggested talking to her boss but she said she'd had a number of conversations with him. He'd ignored her.

We took matters into our own hands and hatched a plan. We would go down, all of us, and confront the manager with his poor behaviour and urge him to protect his staff, which after all, was his responsibility.

I wanted to do all the talking but we agreed that the manager would probably take more notice of a bloke. My partner was the designated discipliner.

Our other two kids came along, both young adults. I have no idea what was going through their heads at the time but clearly they wanted to support their sister and also have a story to tell about their deranged parents.

Reader, it worked.

The manager started to manage. Two weeks later, my daughter quit to work in a dress shop.

The worst behaviour there was theft and it's hard to deal with that when it's just you and the thief alone in the shop.

Look, it's true that not everyone is an 18 year old who has not yet learned to manage the drunken fools. A special shoutout here to a woman called Bec (Bek? Beck?) at the Hotel Canobolas in Orange during the long weekend.

She evicted a malevolent completely out-of-control type single-handedly and with good humour and she was, maybe, not that far off 18 herself. I can never tell people's ages anymore. But should you have to?

These new punishments are the result of lobbying by the SDA, the union which represents retail workers. Good work, particularly since the McKell Institute found 85 per cent of retail workers have been abused or assaulted at work.

Bernie Smith, SDA secretary NSW and ACT, says he doesn't want anyone to be charged - he just wants behaviour to change. His union has been campaigning on this since 2016. No one, he says, deserves a serve.

Gary Mortimer, professor in the faculty of business and law at QUT, says the data indicate increasing levels of customer aggression and abuse directed at front-line workers.

He also believes hospitality workers, any one dealing in a service role, receptionists, Uber drivers, should be entitled to similar protections.

"We saw it begin during the pandemic and it's not going away, it's worsening."

And of course, it's what's happening in the workplace in terms of support.

Mortimer says it's important for organisations to manage these types of risks to employees' safety under work, health and safety laws.

Because not everyone wants a posse of deranged family members showing up at work.