Major strike in Quebec to wake up hotel giants

At a time when the hotel industry is enjoying a spectacular economic recovery following the pandemic disaster, its employees are demanding their share of the profits. This morning, over 2,600 hotel workers launched a nationwide 24-hour strike affecting some 20 hotels in Montreal, Quebec City and Sherbrooke.

This action, the first of its kind in these coordinated negotiations, is aimed at obtaining wage increases of 36% over four years, improved benefits, and protection against bosses' interference in tip management.

François Houle, vice-president of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel-CSN workers' union, on strike today, believes his hotel's position on work organization is looking to the past. "They want to go back to 'split shifts', as it's called in industry jargon. That is, you can come in the morning from 8 a.m. to noon, then go home, then come back from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. in the evening."

"These are working conditions we haven't seen in over 30 years. There's no way we're going back to those years. People today want a certain quality of life. It seems that employers right now would like to be able to move employees from one place to another, regardless of their skills, specialties and so on."

Relations with management are already strained in the workplace. Indeed, the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, owned by international luxury hotel giant Fairmount, has repeatedly broken the terms of the collective agreement in recent years, imposing unpaid training on employees, for example.

The union's vice-president explains, "At the Queen Elizabeth, we have over 400 grievances." Grievances are complaints filed by employees when the employer fails to honour the employment contract.

"It can be for so many things. It could be unpaid overtime, for example, but it's still problems that haven't been dealt with, that have accumulated. We're left with a mountain of grievances to deal with on the eve of a new employment contract."

In place of the rollbacks demanded by the multinational, the union believes it's high time to recognize the expertise of local workers and offer them working conditions to match.

Houle asserts, "We need to recognize employees for what they are, professionals in their field. Today, we have schools like the ITHQ that train the best in the tourism industry. It's a vision of tourism at the Quebec or even Canadian level, which considers that people who are professionals in this industry give a better quality of service."

However, hotel owners and conglomerates are increasingly relying on agency workers to bypass collective agreements. Since they are not unionized, bosses can ask agency workers to perform tasks that are not covered by a collective agreement. They also have no access to the same insurance, sick leave and vacation entitlements as permanent employees.

According to the union's vice-president, the use of these workers has an impact on the quality of work, placing them in a highly exploitative situation.

"Honestly, they obviously don't have the same skills as the employees who work for us or who come out of the province's schools. These are people who are thrown from one place to another. Today, they're here. Tomorrow, they're somewhere else. These are people who don't necessarily have the opportunity to develop ties with a local community."

Rather than increasing the use of this kind of non-unionized temporary workforce, the union proposes offering better working conditions to attract more people to the industry.

"I think it's important to raise the bar a little to attract people to the industry. We're there now, we've lost all our purchasing power over the last few years. 2024 is supposed to be an even better year [for the hotel industry] than what we had in 2019, which was pre-pandemic and was the best numbers we'd had historically in Quebec."