Mr Haider and his housemates escaped with just their laptops and mobile phones. After investigations, police found the fire had most likely started from a failed attempt to steal a motorbike, but no culprit was ever found.

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"Suddenly life became upside down, everything was inside the house, everything burnt, clothes, shoes," he said.

"I was like, 'What a bad day for me.'"

Over the next few years, that day would pale in comparison to what Mr Haider would experience.

Last Tuesday, the Federal Court found that Mr Haider and fellow worker Midhun Basi had their wages stolen on a scale which could see their case being the largest case of wage theft relating to individual workers in Australian history.

A final pay out has yet to be determined, but their employer could be liable for penalties in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, after Justice John Halley found that the employer had committed numerous serious contraventions of the Fair Work Act.

For Mr Haider, the outcome is the culmination of a four-year legal battle that resulted from him trying to find a way to study and live in Australia.

While studying towards a Masters of Accounting, Mr Haider worked at an Indian restaurant in Shellharbour. Prior to coming to Australia, Mr Haider worked as a tandoori chef at restaurants in his home city of Karachi, in Pakistan. Mr Haider would use these skills at the Shellharbour restaurant, where he ran the tandoor, a clay oven heated by a charcoal fire, as well as assisting in the preparation of other dishes and serving customers.

It was at the Shellharbour restaurant that he would meet Vaisakh Mohanan Usha and Priyadevi Sunil Kumar, who co-owned the Adithya Kerala Restaurant in Wollongong.

The pair approached Mr Haider and offered him a full time job as a chef, as they were about to open a second restaurant in Nowra.

"They said, 'When are you free to go to Nowra with us?' So one day we decided to go and see the place, that was the first time I went with [Mr Usha and Ms Kumar]," Mr Haider said.

The restaurant to-be was in an alley off Junction Street, the main strip in Nowra, and was previously a cafe. Mr Haider and a co-worker were required to refit the double-fronted premises to be a restaurant with space for diners to eat in.

"We started cleaning that restaurant, we painted it black inside and out, and then two [or] three days later, we got to know that it was a historic building," Mr Haider said.

"We were not supposed to change the colour, the local council gave us the notice to change the colour again. We made it all black, then we made it all pink again."

While fitting out the restaurant, Mr Haider first got a sense of the way payment would work while working for Mr Usha.

Mr Haider said when he realised that the restaurant was not ready to open, he needed money to cover his bills between finishing his employment at the Shellharbour restaurant and the opening of the Nowra premises.

"I talked to [my employer] and they would be like, 'Don't worry, once the restaurant starts, we will pay off, I will adjust everything in there. Meanwhile, I'll give you something to just pay off your bills.' At that time, I realised that I had no option. They paid really nice. I left the [Shellharbour] job. I realised that I had no other options."

The Nowra restaurant opened with a day for friends and family members of the owners where 50-60 people showed up. The experience was a radical step up for Mr Haider.

"At Garam Masala I was just doing the tandoor, but when I started in Nowra, I was the only person who was working," he said. "[A friend] who started with me, he had no experience. We were just two people alone there."

While it might have just been the two of them in the restaurant when it opened for regular trade, Mr Haider soon found out that they weren't alone.

Mr Usha had installed cameras in the restaurant which allowed him to watch what his staff in Nowra were up to while he was in Wollongong. One day, Mr Haider heard a voice speaking in Malayalam, a language from southern India he didn't understand.

"[My co-worker] was like 'Something is moving' and I was like, what, what is happening, and the camera moves and he [Mr Usha] started giving instructions from that camera."

With Mr Usha watching their every move, Mr Haider said that while working at the restaurant in Nowra he was rarely able to take breaks. Mr Haider describes working long hours, from 10am to 10pm, however in his judgement, Justice Halley said that Mr Haider and Mr Basi did not work 12 hour days and that it was not possible to conclude on the balance of probabilities that the applicants had worked overtime or more than five hours on any day without a break.

Being in the Nowra CBD, Mr Haider said patronage at the cafe varied. There was a solid base of local customers, however during holiday periods the two staff were overwhelmed. With just one staff member in the kitchen and one serving customers, floor staff would cook and chefs would serve customers. The restaurant also offered delivery which Mr Haider said he would do himself, including dropping off meals at 9.30pm to staff at Shoalhaven Hospital, before coming back to close up the shop.

"It was really hectic, it was not easy," he said.

During this time, Mr Haider had moved from Wollongong to Nowra, and lived as a tenant at Lissa Jane de Sailles's house. Ms de Sailles, an artist, rented out a room to Mr Haider as well as co-worker Mr Basi.

"They were lovely guys. I was watching them go to work at 10 o'clock in the morning and come home at 10 or 11 o'clock at night," she said.

Describing the pair as "perfect tenants", the trio became a household and being just a few years older than her son, Ms de Sailles said she became fond of the pair.

"They were just like sons to me, in a way."

Seeing the patterns of work of both Mr Haider and Mr Basi and being familiar with the way that the restaurant and catering sector operated, Ms de Sailles said she became increasingly concerned about the pair.

"I started questioning them saying, 'How come you're working these long hours?'" she said.

"From my own experience, the catering industry has devolved. Young people now don't have the opportunities that I did when I was cooking.

"I started working in RSL Club, where you bundied on and bundied off, even for a 15 minute break," she said, referring to clocking on and off via a machine. "We got meal allowances, we paid union fees.

"All of those conditions have deteriorated over time."

Not only were the workers working long hours, Mr Usha was withholding their wages.

Justice Halley found that Mr Usha knowingly did not pay weekend holiday rates, in contravention of the Award, did not pay the full amount for ordinary hours and demanded that Mr Basi make payments back to the business of around $511 each fortnight, as well as requiring Mr Basi to cover the business's tax liabilities out of his wages. Mr Usha demanded Mr Haider pay $1400 to cover the cost of his visa sponsorship.

Later, Mr Usha would say the $511 payment was to cover loans made to Mr Bais for various expenses including a wedding in India, however Justice Halley found that no loans were ever made to either worker.

Ms de Sailles said she saw the impact that the financial stress was having on Mr Basi and Mr Haider, but it was one night that stood out.

"It came out somewhere along the line that Midhun [Basi] was sending money home to his mother and father," she said.

"He basically came home crying one night and I'm thinking, this is a grown man crying, why is he crying? I said, 'What's going on?' And he said, 'Well, my parents are gonna get kicked out of their house in India.'"

Retelling the story, six years later, Ms de Sailles starts to feel the emotions of that day coming back.

"I just said, 'This has got to stop.'"

Ms de Sailles got in contact with South Coast Labour Council secretary Arthur Rorris via email. The message popped up in Mr Rorris's inbox.

"I am appalled at the level of abuse and I am fed up with hearing these stories and feeling that I cannot do anything," Ms de Sailles wrote. "I hope you can get to the bottom of this."

This message would be the spark that lit the flame of four years of legal action as the South Coast Labour Council and its legal team worked to recover the lost wages of Mr Haider and Mr Basi and launched a firestorm campaign to "take wage theft off the menu".

For Mr Haider himself, speaking up came at great personal risk. Mr Haider recalls Mr Usha threatening him with closing the restaurant and turning it into a grocery store to cut back on staff. This would mean that Mr Haider, who had deferred his degree and was now in Australia on a working visa sponsored by Mr Usha, would lose his right to stay in Australia.

Mr Usha would pay Mr Haider intermittently and irregularly. The culmination of factors wore down Mr Haider.

"It was really hard. To be very honest, I have never seen this in Pakistan before. It was the worst time of my life," he said.

Mr Haider describes falling into periods of depression as he was unable to move forward in his life and felt stuck. His visa application was thwarted by a lack of pay slips from Mr Usha.

"If I leave this job, I have nothing. My visa is in process. What should I do?"

Once Mr Rorris and the Labour Council became aware of what was going on, the legal battle began.

Mr Usha was served a letter of demands at his Wollongong restaurant by union representatives. Mr Rorris said, at the time, he estimated that Mr Basi alone was owed more than $200,000 in unpaid wages. After this, Mr Usha called in Mr Haider for a meeting in Wollongong.

"They invited me to the restaurant with the whole family and they pressured me to write a statement for them," Mr Haider said.

Mr Haider declined, and then called his father, a police officer in Pakistan, who told him not to sign anything.

The next evening, Mr Usha called Mr Haider back to the restaurant again. Mr Haider told him that he wanted to resign.

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"Everyone was coming and convincing me, we are a family and all this, then at around eight or nine o'clock he brought out a paper from the kitchen," Mr Haider said.

It was a pre-written statement that exonerated Mr Usha.

"This is pure bulls---," Mr Haider said. Mr Haider asked to take the statement home, to read it and consider but Mr Usha refused.

"This piece of paper is my statement, and I'm not allowed to take it home and read it? They said 'We feed you, we give you the job,' and I said, 'Even for my visa you asked me for money, I paid my own money, I never get paid on time, no payslips, nothing. You want me to sign this? I will tell everyone what you have done to me and Midhun [Basi] also.'"

Mr Haider walked out and resigned for good.

As the unions and lawyers fought out the battle in the Federal Court, Mr Haider continued working in restaurants in the Illawarra and found a new sponsor for his working visa.

Now, with one court date left in July for the parties to settle payments and costs, Mr Haider said he is finally breathing a sigh of relief.

"The decision came and I felt some relief, after four years. He [Mr Usha] really got a harsh penalty, because the way he was part of my life was so bad."

Throughout the trial, Mr Haider and Mr Basi kept in contact with Ms de Sailles.

"Midhun [Basi] sends me a message at Christmas," she said. "It's just amazing, what's happened."

More broadly however, Ms de Sailles said that the protections that she enjoyed when working in hospitality have long gone, allowing cases such as this to occur.

"Young people who didn't have the opportunity to know about being in unions and to know about rights at work have been robbed," she said. "Something's happened, whether through neoliberalism or government policies to [create] those unhealthy power relationships between workers and staff."

With wage theft cases popping up frequently in the media, Ms de Sailles said that people have the ability to speak out.

"If people see something like that going on, just go and make inquiries to find out what you can do to help. We've just been brainwashed that greed is good and it's not, because we've created an underclass of people, and we're bringing people in from other countries, and they're being treated like slaves. And that's not fair."

Mr Haider said that he knows that he is not the only international student or worker who has suffered these conditions, and said there's a way out for others in similar situations.

"My one and only advice would be that don't get scared. Be vocal. If you feel that someone is taking your money, not giving you your money on time, we call it out, stand up and talk about it. Because the more you get scared, the worse a condition you would be in, they will take advantage of that. So don't get scared," he said.

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