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Demand for Government and Employer Respect for Rights Broad Support for Hotel Workers' Fight for an End to Pandemic TerminationsUNITE HERE! Local 40 which represents thousands of hospitality workers in BC, held a press conference in Vancouver on December 3 to release a new report entitled Unequal Women -- Report on the Impact of pandemic Terminations on Women of Colour in B.C.'s Hospitality Industry. The press conference was addressed by UNITE HERE! Local 40 spokespersons and members and Vancouver City Councillor Jean Swanson, Single Mothers' Alliance spokesperson Viveca Ellis, Mahtab Laghaei of Women Transforming Cities and Vancouver and District Labour Council spokesperson Seema Ahluwalia.
Both the federal government and the provincial government have failed to respond to repeated requests that they take action to ensure the job security of the workers. The provincial government has refused to amend the Employment Standards Act to extend the time that an employer must keep a worker laid off due to lack of work on the list to be recalled until the pandemic is over.
Vancouver City Councillor Jean Swanson said that "The BC government needs to do the right thing here and stand up for racialized women. Stop the discrimination against racialized women by these hotels. Stop allowing the hotels to push women into poverty. The solution is easy and costs virtually nothing: change the Employment Standards Act to extend recall rights to when the pandemic is over." Speaking on behalf of the Vancouver and District Labour Council, Seema Ahluwalia expressed solidarity with the hospitality workers and their union. She said, "The Unequal Women report exposes the ugly agenda of the hotel industry to destroy sustainable jobs and replace them with low-paid, precarious work. Indigenous and racialized women are the backbone of the service sector where most job losses have occurred during the pandemic. This is an urgent call to support our union and non-union sisters, demand that the government hold the hotel industry accountable for the billions in welfare dollars they have received, and work together to prevent the hotel industry from impoverishing more families and communities."
For the full report click here. (Photos: UniteHere 40)
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The
report is based on investigations done by the union at five BC Hotels,
the Pan Pacific, Pacific Gateway and Hilton Metrotown in Greater
Vancouver, the Coast Bastion in Nanaimo and the Coast Victoria
Harbourside in Victoria. All these hotels have taken advantage of the
pandemic-related closures to terminate hundreds of workers,
refusing to negotiate extensions of recall provisions in collective
agreements as dozens of other hotels have done. The investigation
revealed that women accounted for the majority of workers terminated at
each hotel, and that in four of the five hotels women of colour comprised the
majority of the terminated women workers. Many of the terminated
workers have worked for the hotels for decades. The aim of the
employers is to get rid of both the workers and the wages and working
conditions that have been negotiated over many years.
For
its part, the Federal government is directly responsible for the
termination of over 100 workers, 90 of them women, at the Pacific
Gateway Hotel which is near the Vancouver airport and is contracted by
the Federal government as a quarantine site for people flying into the
country. The Red Cross was contracted by the federal government
to take over the workers' jobs and all appeals to the Trudeau
government to have the laid off and fired workers reinstated have gone
unanswered.
The
report recommends that the BC government follow the lead of
other governments to ensure that no employer can terminate long-term
staff as a result of the pandemic and that federal leaders should
condition employers' pandemic subsidies on workers' retention to ensure
laid-off workers' jobs are protected. The report points out that
"Since the onset of COVID-19, the hospitality industry has lobbied all
levels of government for public relief. The provincial government has
provided the sector with close to $230 million in direct relief since
December 2020, along with access to $345 million in grants. BC's
hospitality sector also received more than $1.2 billion in wage
subsidies
from the federal government between March 2020 and May 2021.