Toronto Hotel Workers Fight Back

Below is a speech by Emily Tang of the Metropolitan Hotel Workers’ Committee (MHWC), presented at a Socialist Action forum in Toronto on June 18.

Our hotel employs about 400 workers. Almost all of us are immigrants and most of us are women. Our employer is abusive and runs a sweatshop. Basic workplace rights are ignored. Legal rest breaks are not provided, yet time for breaks we didn’t get have been deducted from our pay.

Workers in housekeeping have had to work with chemicals that leave burns on their bodies and interfere with their breathing. We are forced to lift heavy loads and push huge trolleys that injure us. Perhaps 10 percent of our workers are injured yet the employer almost never gives modified duties to those with injuries.

We feel that racist attitudes are widespread among management. Filipino workers in housekeeping have signed a petition naming their manager as a racist. One Pakistani worker who is a devout Muslim was pressured into quitting because he prayed during his breaks, and another Muslim worker found that his work-station was being bugged by hotel security.

Black workers at the hotel complain they are never given jobs that involve serving food or drink. They can clean tables or work as housekeepers but not act as servers. The hotel wants to make money during Caribana [a huge Toronto festival of Caribbean music and culture in early August] but lays on extra security to deal with an increase in Black guests.

Harassment is at crazy levels. One worker was disciplined for speaking Spanish to a coworker in the kitchen and, after I objected to this, I was given a warning for taking a discarded cookie. I had worked all day without a break at the time.

Our union is HERE (Hotel Employees, Restaurant Employees International Union) Local 75. It fails to represent us seriously. When we first organized to try to win decent representation, I would have said simply that our union was weak. Now I would say that our union leaders and reps are on the side of management.

Grievances are not filed. In the case of the worker who was punished for speaking Spanish, the union steward told him that he had spoken to the head of the department, who told him that there was no case, so a grievance could not be filed. When I tried to file a grievance over being forced to do heavy work that was not part of my job, the shop steward told me that same thing.

When we started to organize against this failure to represent us, the union leaders and managers formed an alliance against us. The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) has worked with us a lot. The union leaders drew up a petition for workers to sign calling on OCAP to keep away from the hotel.

Stewards were given time off work to collect signatures while managers went around bullying people into signing.

We reject this petition as something people were pressured into signing.

Even under these conditions, dozens of workers refused to sign. Earlier this year, we formed the Metropolitan Hotel Workers’ Committee. It is a rank-and-file committee that is dedicated to taking back our union from the bureaucrats that control it. We have picketed the hotel with community supporters. We have set up a web site that has had tens of thousands of visits and that workers and management in the hotel follow closely. As a result of our work, workers’ grievances that would otherwise have been ignored have been dealt with. Management has been forced to issue instructions around reporting injuries. Meal breaks have started to be respected where they were not before.

We are organizing to inform high-profile customers of the hotel—like the Human Rights Commission—of the abuses going on there. Muslim organizations are working with us to challenge racism against our Muslim workers. We are calling on the Caribana organizers to take action.

Students at York University are working with us to have the Metropolitan Hotel’s owner, Henry Wu, kicked off the board of the York Foundation, at York University. We are working to force the company to remove the dangerous chemicals that the housekeeping workers have to use. Some actions on this issue will be held over the next couple of weeks.

Claims by the union leaders and some of their supporters that we are ‘anti-union’ are nonsense. We are working to mobilize the rank-and-file members to take back our union from the bureaucrats so that it can become something that fights our employer instead of collaborating with the boss.

I want to say that what is happening at our hotel should be part of a broader movement to deal with the conditions that immigrant workers face.

A few weeks ago, I visited the memorial to the Chinese workers who died building the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1880s. Five thousand Chinese workers came here and 1400 died laying tracks through the Rocky Mountains.

Those who survived were left homeless and unemployed when they were no longer needed. Racist laws were passed to prevent them bringing their families over here.

As a Chinese hotel worker, I realize how little things have changed. Last week, I was walking through Toronto’s Chinatown and came across a man yelling abuse at an old Chinese woman. He was a city by-law enforcement officer and she was a 74-year-old vegetable seller. Poor people who survive by selling vegetables and who cannot get a license from the city are being swept from the streets so that Chinatown can be a tourist showpiece where the poverty of the local people is hidden from sight.

These two city officials threw this old woman to the ground and took her vegetables. I challenged their behavior and dozens of local people backed me up. We won’t let them get away with abuse like this.

A few weeks ago, OCAP asked our committee to help them take action against a fancy restaurant in the Financial District that was not paying wages owed to two Spanish-speaking immigrants. We invaded the place, threatened to set up a regular picket line, and won the wages owed. The Ontario Labour Relations Board had done nothing, but our action got results.

Unions today have lost a strong sense of how to fight back seriously. We can never change that from the top. Only a movement of rank-and-file workers can change things. Our committee is working to help get such a movement underway.

I hope you will support us and stand in solidarity with us as we fight our employer, and the union leaders who try to stifle us. Thank you very much for hearing me.