In the News
Workers Persist in Raising Just Demands
BC Hotel Workers Step Up Actions to Defend Their Rights
Hotel workers in the Greater Vancouver Area, members of UNITE HERE Local 40 are continuing vigorous actions at three hotels to support their demands for reinstatement to their jobs.
Pacific Gateway
The Pacific Gateway Hotel in Richmond, BC near the Vancouver International Airport was contracted by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) from March 2020 to February 1, 2022 to serve as a quarantine hotel. Most of the workers employed by the hotel were laid off and replaced by Red Cross staff. The workers and their union, UNITE HERE Local 40, repeatedly appealed to local MPs and federal government ministers to reinstate the laid off workers., testifying before parliamentary committees and meeting with MPs. The workers have been on strike since May 2021 after the hotel terminated 143 of the laid off workers.
UNITE HERE Local 40 reports that the federal government “pulled out of Pacific Gateway in January [2022] citing concerns over the hotel’s treatment of workers.” They report that the “PHAC relocated to another Richmond area hotel this month and said in a statement, ‘we have expressed our disappointment with Pacific Gateway and their treatment of their unionized workforce throughout these challenging times.’ Workers had urged PHAC, federal Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos, and his predecessor Minister Patty Hajdu, to move out of the hotel.”
The 380-room hotel has reopened but has refused to take the terminated workers back. Workers are asking future hotel guests to boycott the hotel. Pardeep Thandi, a long-term housekeeper, is quoted in the UNITE HERE Local 40 press release: “During the height of the pandemic, the owner of Pacific Gateway fired 90 per cent of our housekeeping staff. Who is cleaning the hotel now? They threw our experienced staff away like garbage. We ask future hotel guests to respect our picket line and please stay somewhere else.”
The hotel boycott is endorsed by the BC Federation of Labour and the Canadian Labour Congress.
Hilton Metrotown
On Valentine’s Day workers on the picket line at the Hilton Metrotown Hotel in Burnaby staged a mock wedding to urge couples to choose another site for their weddings. The hotel has been a popular venue for weddings and has a promotion called To Have and To Hold, an “all inclusive intimate wedding ceremony” package for customers.
The workers have their own campaign called “Don’t Put a Ring on It at Hilton!,” asking wedding planners and couples to hold their weddings at other venues that respect workers. During the pandemic Hilton Metrotown terminated 97 long-term staff and, after a one-day strike in protest, locked out all the workers on April 15, 2021. Workers have been on the picket line since then.
The union has a “BC Travel Alert” on its website which lists the ten BC hotels that have not agreed to retain their workers during the pandemic.
Pan Pacific Vancouver
Workers at the Pan Pacific Hotel are demanding the reinstatement of nearly 100 workers who were terminated by the hotel during the pandemic, most of them women. In negotiations with the hotel for a first contract the union is demanding fair housekeeping workloads, wage increases and the right of laid-off workers to return to their pre-pandemic jobs.
The union has taken the hotel to court and in December a BC Supreme Court judge allowed a lawsuit filed by a former Pan Pacific concierge to proceed as a class action against the wrongful termination of approximately 100 employees and that severance rules required under provincial laws were circumvented.
Throughout the pandemic hotel workers have led the fight to protect the jobs of workers in sectors of the economy which closed or curtailed operations. In the extraordinary circumstances of long layoffs contract provisions and labour laws did not provide sufficient protection for workers’ jobs. Through their determined actions, hotel workers were successful in negotiating extensions of recall rights with the majority of the hotel owners in the province. The provincial NDP government has to date not taken action to amend the recall provisions of the Employment Standards Act to protect the hotel workers and the thousands of other workers, organized and unorganized, who lost their jobs when their negotiated or statutory period of recall ended before employers were able to reopen.
In fighting for their rights the hotel workers have made it clear that they are fighting for the rights of all workers.
(Workers’ Forum, posted March 4, 2022)
