Indo-Canadian Community Must Support Striking Workers!

By Harinder Mahil and Gulzar Grewal

Guests who have booked a night at the Radisson Blu Vancouver Airport or held an event recently at The Deck at Radisson Blu may be surprised to be confronted by noisy demonstrations and striking women shouting chants in Punjabi. 

Indo-Canadian workers are among a group leading the longest hotel strike in British Columbia, and perhaps the longest hotel strike in Canada’s history.  For three and a half years, workers at Radisson Blu Vancouver Airport and The Deck at Radisson Blu, members of UNITE HERE Local 40, have walked the picket line in every kind of weather – enduring the rainy cold as well as summer heat domes – to fight for justice on the job.  The issues in the strike are wages, working conditions and reinstatement of employees.

At the height of the pandemic as vaccines were being rolled out, hotel management terminated 143 long-term workers, or 70% of the staff at the hotel (then called Pacific Gateway).  Unlike other hotels which struggled during the pandemic, the hotel pocketed millions of dollars from the federal government while it was used as a quarantine site for twenty months.  

In stark contrast to other unionized hotels, management refused to agree to recall workers to their jobs as business returned to normal. That was devastating to workers, particularly for those who had invested decades working at the hotel, including Indo-Canadian grandmothers who had worked at the hotel for over forty years. 

Most of the impacted workers are women, many of them immigrants, including Punjabi room attendants and cooks. Imagine being a 60-year-old woman terminated from a job with good pay, health and pension benefits and having to start all over again for no good reason.  

In the years before the pandemic, workers fought to make these good, unionized hospitality jobs. The last time workers at this hotel went on strike was nearly twenty-four years ago.  For some first-generation immigrants, this hotel has been their only workplace since arriving in Canda. 

The workers who remained launched a strike in May 2021 to protest the employer’s mass terminations of their co-workers and efforts to undermine their union.  They have walked the picket line daily for over 1,200 days, held demonstrations with community supporters and elected officials, urged customers to boycott, and shared their stories with the media.  

Yet, the owner has repeatedly violated labour laws by using impermissible workers during the strike. Recently, the BC Labour Relations Board issued a cease and desist order against the owner for threating and intimidating strikers on the picket line. (The owner has faced other legal troubles unrelated to the labour dispute.)   

This has been a difficult strike.  One may wonder why workers would continue to fight after three years and counting.  Ask any of the strikers and they will tell you that they take great pride in working at this Richmond hotel, their home away from home, and they will continue to fight for the family-supporting hotel jobs they built here. They will not let anyone unjustly take away their livelihoods.  

The BC Federation of Labour and the Canadian Labour Congress have issued a boycott against Radisson Blu Vancouver Airport and The Deck at Radisson Blu. Despite the boycott, members of the Indo-Canadian community have attended wedding events at The Deck at Radisson Blu or stayed overnight at the hotel unaware of the ongoing strike. 

We urge the South Asian community to support workers at Radisson Blu & The Deck by using other hotels and venues that are not behind picket lines.  There are a number of unionized hotels in Richmond that have similar or larger facilities than those at Radisson Blu. For a list of such hotels go toFairHotel.org. 

Harinder Mahil is a human rights activist and is secretary of the Dr. Hari Sharma Foundation and Gulzar Grewal is Vice President of UNITE HERE Local 40.