Migrant Workers and Labor Standards in Canadian Restaurants

Labor Standards and the Canadian Labor Market

Labor standards cover aspects such as minimum wage, overtime pay, maximum and minimum work hours, statutory holidays, and parental leave. They represent an employee's minimum labor rights — a base below which organizations are not permitted to go. They are essentially a collection of labor laws that enable employees to protect personal time, achieve a better work-family balance, and receive a decent wage under acceptable working conditions. These standards hold significance for unionized workers as well, since they imply that the collective bargaining approach can help secure improvements above and beyond the minimum standards for all workers (Fairey).

The Decline of Collective Bargaining Power

Ever since the 1970s, Canadian industrial unionism has been experiencing a mounting crisis. Contrary to the post-war years of economic boom, real wage growth in Canada has stagnated, combined with a decline in union density in the sectors of mining, transportation, and manufacturing. On the whole, the Canadian labor market has witnessed a waning of collective bargaining power, as evidenced by national trends of chronically high unemployment and an increasingly polarized dual labor market — a marked gap between well-paid jobs and a growing number of part-time, low-paid, contract, temporary, and other contingent positions.

Canada's labor crisis has partially economic roots: the swift diffusion of manpower-displacing and skill-reducing technologies, increased capital mobility (typically toward low-wage, high-repression areas), heightened international competitiveness (eroding monopoly rents, job security, and higher wages), and a sectoral shift in economic composition away from the base of industrial unionism in mass manufacturing (Wells). Furthermore, major transformations have occurred in the Canadian working class over the last century. The precise mix of skill levels, individuals, and racial or ethnic backgrounds has been shaped primarily by employment and recruitment practices of employers and non-owner managers, with some assistance from Canadian immigration authorities (Heron). By the end of the 19th century, economic power rested predominantly in the hands of individual businessmen, business families, and limited partnerships. From the start of the twentieth century, however, large organizations began dominating most sectors of Canadian economic life (Heron).

Personal Experience as a Restaurant Waitress

The restaurant and hotel sector is characterized by high employee turnover and readily accessible casual or temporary work, attracting migrants, students, and individuals seeking short-term financial gain. These supply-side characteristics unite to make the Canadian restaurant and hotel industry one of the most poorly organized and lowest-paid industries in the national economy.

My first job in Canada was as a waitress at a restaurant owned by a Canadian. As business was somewhat slow, our wages were constantly delayed. After several weeks of receiving no pay, a friend of mine and I decided to quit. We requested that our employer pay us what we were owed, to which she responded that it would take a little longer. She owed me more than five hundred Canadian dollars and my friend no less than a thousand Canadian dollars. She claimed she had no money to pay our wages. On one particular evening, when we visited to request our money again, we encountered her husband, who began yelling at us. The visit ended with my friend having a heated argument with the owner's husband, and both of us being ordered to leave the restaurant. We ultimately departed with no pay whatsoever. On many subsequent occasions, we attempted to contact the owner regarding our wages, but she never answered our calls. This continued for three weeks, until I was hired by a Chinese restaurant.

This new job kept me very busy. Furthermore, because I had limited English-speaking proficiency, I was unable to pursue legal action against my previous employers and eventually gave up trying to recover what they owed me. My experience highlights the severe challenges facing ethnic minority and migrant workers whose names are not officially included in organizational payrolls and who may possess limited English-language skills when trying to enforce their employment rights. Seeking another job and moving on is frequently the only viable option for them. My new job was rather exhausting, as I had to work full shifts every day for a specified wage per shift. This meant I received no overtime pay; my coworkers and I were expected to continue working until the very last customer had departed (Right and Pollert).

Conclusion: Political Roots of Canada's Labor Crisis

The country's labor crisis has partially political roots as well. It is most fundamentally rooted in governments' declining capacity and willingness to employ Keynesian policies of macroeconomic stabilization to foster employment. Further, it is grounded in growing reductions to the social wage — including education, healthcare, and public welfare — and a succession of state attacks on workers' collective bargaining. These include the deregulation of transportation, communications, and other highly unionized sectors, as well as restrictions on labor rights, including the suspension of strike rights, abrogation of public-sector contracts, and the imposition of wage controls. Lastly, Canada's labor crisis has roots in the implementation of international trade agreements — the Canada–U.S. Free Trade Agreement, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and the North American Free Trade Agreement — all of which have enhanced the autonomy of transnational firms from state regulation (Wells).

Skilled 19th-century workers exercised considerably more power than their predecessors. Well into the era of industrialization, craftsmen contributed significantly to community affairs, politics, and particularly to the organization of their own work. In Toronto's workplaces, craftsmen exercised a monopoly on experience and skill to dictate terms to employers across various areas — what would today be called a high level of production control (Kealey).

This paper has shown that, while migrant and ethnic minority employees share many of the poor conditions suffered by most restaurant and hotel workers, there are numerous additional factors — including immigration status, informal work arrangements in small restaurants with ethnic-minority owners, and racism and discrimination in the labor market — that contribute to relegating and retaining some migrant and ethnic minority groups at the industry's lowest tier. There, they face the worst working conditions, suffer exploitation, and find it difficult to remedy workplace problems (Right and Pollert).

Bibliography

Fairey, David. Eroding Worker Protections. Vancouver: CCPA, 2005.

Heron, Craig. The Canadian Labour Movement: A Short History. Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, 1996.

Kealey, Gregory. "The Honest Workingman and Workers' Control: The Experience of Toronto Skilled Workers, 1860–1892." 1975.

Right, Tessa, and Anna Pollert. "The Experiences of Ethnic Minority and Migrant Workers in Hotels and Restaurants: Strategies and Necessities." Working Lives Research Institute (2006).

Wells, Donald M. "Origins of Canada's Wagner Model of Industrial Relations: The United Auto Workers in Canada." 2015.