Kanchi Uttamchandani | Assistant News Editor
Featured image: Toronto Rising summit gathered over 100 people united by common struggle for fair living wages, affordable housing and equal rights. | Courtesy of Unite HERE Local 75 (Facebook)
York activists joined UNITE HERE Local 75 union members last week in celebrating “Hotel Workers Rising,” a decade-long campaign centred around securing rights for hospitality workers.
“With Toronto Rising, we are taking the next step. We’re partnering with community groups across the city to stand up for a living wage for all, good jobs in our communities, affordable housing across the GTA, a Toronto that works for young people and equal rights under the law for immigrant- and service-workers,” reads a media advisory released by Marc Hollin, coordinator for UNITE HERE Local 75.
Melissa Sobers, food service campus coordinator for Real Food Real Jobs campaign, states the main goal of the Toronto Rising summit was to be a kick-off event for the 2,000 low-wage food service workers who will potentially be entering into a strike across the city, including at universities like York.
“The strike would be a collective bargaining for living wages and benefits with the goal of ultimately breaking the cycle of precariousness, lack of dignity and stigma that food service jobs hold,” she says.
Sobers recounts the event’s historical origins, saying hotel workers across the city used to make poverty wages similar to what food service workers are paid today, approximately $12 per hour with no benefits.
“Due to their tireless acts of solidarity and demonstrations, hotel workers in downtown Toronto are currently making approximately $20 per hour with decreased workloads and full benefits, thus setting a standard for the vast majority of hotel workers in the city in terms of wages,” says Sobers.
Sobers states that food service workers are now trying to achieve the same standards of employment. Allies like Fight for $15 & Fairness in Canada and the United States, the Changing Workplaces Review in Ontario and the organizing efforts of the Black Lives Matter movement make this goal seem more achievable.
“The event also hosted discussions on how the labour laws in Ontario presently discriminate against contract service workers, such as the York Aramark food service workers, ultimately targeting racialized people since they are over-represented in this line of work,” explains Sobers.
For instance, Filipino workers alone compose 75 per cent of hotel workers in Toronto, according to The Philippine Reporter.
“We understand that low-wage jobs for Filipino immigrants is a growing issue. We have many skilled and educated Filipinos struggling at the bottom of the job market,” said the Filipino Student Association at York, or FSAY, in a statement to Excalibur.
Many Filipinos get stuck in these positions because they are trapped balancing 40-hour work weeks and raising a family, all while getting used to their new environment, according to FSAY.
Meanwhile, the Ontario Public Interest Research Group at York, or OPIRG, intends to collaborate with other campaigns to address issues of unfair treatment of immigrants in the workforce, minimum wage, exorbitant tuition fees and unaffordable rent.
“OPIRG York attended in order to help connect student issues to the broader movement as well as to provide support to the food service workers at York who are currently fighting for more respect in the workplace and better conditions,” says Imran Kaderdina, admin and information coordinator for OPIRG York.
One of the highlights of the event was the Fairbnb coalition, which aims to hold Airbnb, a popular home-sharing platform, accountable for its short-term rentals.
“Airbnb was discussed in the context of its threat to affordable housing access in the city to people like us, the working poor, students in debt as well as the great living-wage jobs that hotel workers have fought so hard to establish,” says Sobers.
Sobers claims Airbnb is a threat because of its non-taxed, non-regulated nature. UNITE HERE Local 75 expresses similar sentiments: “As Airbnb ‘ghost hotels’ proliferate, workers in regulated hotels will see their hours cut. Our paycheques will shrink as our housing costs go up. While Airbnb alone didn’t cause Toronto’s housing affordability crisis, it certainly isn’t helping.”
Filipino Canadian Youth Alliance at York, Ethiopian and Eritrean Workers Network, Federation of Metro Tenants Association, CUPE 3903, U of T’s student union and members from the Osgoode Hall Law union were some of the community groups in attendance.
