The housekeepers revolt: behind the labour dispute at the Royal York Hotel

In an era of decline for organized labour, an aggressive hospitality workers’ union is determined to turn menial labour into middle-class employment. To do so, they need to galvanize the recent immigrants who overwhelmingly staff the service industry. First stop, the Royal York By Nicholas Hune-Brown

Battleground: the hotel union has co-opted celebrity guests, such as Martin Sheen, to draw attention to its cause (Photographs: Strikers by Cristal Cruz-Haicken; Street by Jerryb8/dreamstime.com/Getstock. Illustration by James Dawe)

On a warm morning last September, the managers of the Fairmont Royal York Hotel had a PR problem. The Toronto International Film Festival had just begun, and celebrities were trickling into the city. The 1,365-room downtown hotel was booked solid, and the lush Library Bar stocked with the ingredients for $14 TIFF Tinis, but outside on the sidewalk, hundreds of unionized Royal York workers were on strike, angrily accusing the hotel of exploiting them. They pounded on overturned buckets and exchanged call-and-response chants: “What do we want?” “Contract!” “When do we want it?” “Now!” And they marched back and forth across the grand Front Street entrance singing “We want a contract” to the tune of K’naan’s “Wavin’ Flag,” and hoisting red and black banners emblazoned with the logo of UNITE HERE, the aggressive international union that represents 8,000 hospitality workers across the GTA.

Outside the main doors, Martin Sheen stepped onto the pavement and was immediately mobbed by the crowd. He gave a thumbs-up to the strikers and began shaking hands and slapping backs, looking every bit the left-wing political hero he once played on television. The strikers eagerly linked arms with him and marched before the cameras and TV crews that were scrambling to get the best angle. Someone thrust a megaphone into Sheen’s hands, and he gamely improvised a few slogans. “When it gets tough in labour disputes like these, people say that it’s a lost cause,” he said, his voice rising passionately. “Well, I’m here to remind you that lost causes are the only causes worth fighting for!” The logic seemed a little shaky, but the crowd roared its approval anyway. “Stick to it like a stamp!” he shouted with a final wave, before he and his son Emilio Estevez were whisked off in a white Escalade.

Sheen’s appearance on the picket lines was on all the newscasts that night­—as the union knew it would be—adding a little flash and glam to the story of a labour dispute. For the Royal York, a hotel with a history of peaceful and relatively progressive labour relations, the one-day strike was an embarrassment, the first time workers had walked out in almost 50 years. For UNITE HERE, it was a successful media event—a protest shrewdly designed to gain public support for the workers and send hotel owners across the city a message.

The hospitality industry is bouncing back after a disastrous 2009. Though it may be a few years before hotels return to the record profits of 2007, Canadian occupancy levels and revenue have both nudged upward. As hospitality corporations grow, UNITE HERE wants to make sure that workers’ benefits and salaries grow, as well. What was at stake at the Royal York was job security: the hotel’s owners wanted more power to add and subtract shifts depending on daily demand, while the union wanted a stable schedule—and a stable living—for a group of workers who are mostly visible minorities and immigrant women.

The union’s leaders have an even bigger agenda. In 2010, there were contracts up for negotiation at close to 30 hotels across the GTA. “We want to do for the hospitality industry what organized labour did for the auto sector,” says J. J. Fueser, a research analyst at Local 75, the Toronto branch of UNITE HERE. “We want to turn menial labour into middle-class employment.” It’s a tall order: they’re up against powerful multinational corporations and a public largely unsympathetic to unions.

The Fairmont Royal York is a behemoth, a château-shaped slab of limestone that stretches out over a large city block. The hotel’s main-floor kitchen is an east-to-west airport runway of fluorescent lighting, ochre tiles and gas oven ranges. Each year, the hotel washes five million pounds of laundry, which workers pile into industrial machines the size of suburban garages. When it was first constructed in 1929, across the street from the newly inaugurated Union Station, the hotel was the tallest building in the British Empire and the ultimate symbol of modern opulence. Ads from the time called it “a city within a city block,” but it’s more like a medieval castle, with managers and cooks and maids all coexisting under an almost feudal hierarchy within the building’s thick stone walls.

At the top of the chain are the mostly white and decently paid front-of-house workers. Craig Reaume, the manager in charge of day-to-day operations, presides over the hotel’s 1,200 staff. Reaume is a tall, slender, seemingly unflappable man whose most animated facial expression, produced during moments of extreme stress, is a bemused knitting of the eyebrows. Like so many of the managers at the Royal York, Reaume is able to appear simultaneously aloof and attentive—the precise demeanour that you’d hope to find in an experienced butler. Like many of the managers, too, Reaume is a lifelong student of the science of Making People Feel Comfortable. Hospitality is something that everyone at a hotel takes extremely seriously, from the managers to the bellhops. All high-class hotels have beds and televisions and tiny bottles of complimentary shampoo, so the difference between a satisfied guest and a less-than-satisfied guest—and this is not a minor, touchy-feely difference, but a multimillion-dollar distinction empirically measured by market research firms and then endlessly analyzed and worried over by upper-level management—generally comes down to hospitality, that delicate mixture of servility and human warmth that hotel managers have done their best to systematically instill in their workers.

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