How a Surrey-based Hotel Company is Hurting Women and What We Can Do as a Community To Fight Back!

By Ravi Binning

Co-written with UNITE HERE Local 40

For 17 years, I raised my daughter while cleaning rooms at Pacific Gateway Hotel at Vancouver Airport. I immigrated to Canada from India and I’m a long-time Surrey-Delta resident. My housekeeping job for nearly two decades helped my family survive. I loved my job and would have gladly stayed at Pacific Gateway until I retired.

But after the pandemic hit BC, the hotel owner took away our livelihoods. Unlike other hotels, ours was fully operating. The owner leased our hotel to the federal government to use as a temporary quarantine site but laid most of us off anyway. He took advantage of the pandemic to later terminate me and 142 of my co-workers, many of us women. We were hurt and shocked. I thought, how can I buy food and pay rent with no job? Instead of committing to bring us back to work as regular business returned, the owner threw us away like garbage.  

The owner’s actions have been devastating — most of us are women whose only job since coming to Canada was working at this hotel. Job cuts decimated our housekeeping department with 90% of jobs eliminated. Why would any hotel owner cut the very staff who sanitize and disinfect hotel rooms? I was so upset and angry that I decided to join my co-workers who walked out on strike in May 2021 over the mass firings. This isn’t just about me, but about everyone who lost their jobs at Pacific Gateway. 

The tourism industry is restarting this summer amidst a labour shortage. When 50,000 BC hotel workers lost their jobs early in the pandemic, hotel workers stood up to demand their pre-pandemic jobs back. Hotel workers across the province staged a hunger strike on the lawn of the BC legislature. They fought for and secured the right to return to their jobs at dozens of hotels across the province. And after a 13-month lockout, Hilton Metrotown workers secured the right for 97 of their terminated co-workers to return to their jobs. Is it any wonder that hotels that terminated staff during the height of the pandemic now find it difficult to hire their replacements?

Retaining experienced staff is good for our hotel and good for the hospitality industry that needs experienced staff. Instead, Pacific Gateway has turned its back on workers, many of whom are Surrey residents. This treatment is unacceptable and why the B.C. Federation of Labour endorsed a customer boycott of this hotel. 

What hurts more is that the owner is a member of the same community that many of my co-workers and I are from. Surrey-based PHI Hotel Group, was founded by a South Asian family who started their business selling berries on a farm. One would think that with such humble beginnings, the hotel owner would treat their workers with respect in difficult times. They must have known what it was like to struggle to survive as first-generation immigrants years ago. PHI Hotel Group does not appear to have suffered financially during the pandemic. They recently bought the Meridian Hills Golf Course and have plans to build student housing in Surrey, a hotel, and more residences in the Lower Mainland. 

Some people ask, can’t you get another job? I don’t want to start over at minimum wage, and I should not have to. Women bore the brunt of pandemic job losses in the hospitality industry. Those of us who lost our jobs during Covid are losing economic gains made over decades of hard work. How does the hospitality industry hope to attract more women like me if they treat us like we are disposable? Hospitality workers have endured so much hardship during the pandemic with job losses and the impact of COVID-19 on our families. We deserve better. 

Growing up, I was taught to treat my elders with respect. Many of the Indian women on the picket line are grandmothers. We don’t deserve this. We’re fighting to save good family-supporting hospitality jobs. We will do whatever it takes to get them back, because if we don’t stand up to hotel owners like this, who will? That’s why I’m on strike. I’m not giving up, and I urge the Surrey community to stand with us: respect our boycott and do not meet, eat, or sleep at Pacific Gateway. Let’s show the hotel owner what community really means.

Ravi Binning, striking Pacific Gateway hotel worker, co-written with UNITE HERE Local 40