Media Advisory: BREAKING! Three downtown Vancouver hotels – Hyatt Regency, Westin Bayshore, Pinnacle Harbourfront – launch indefinite strike over need for safe and stable work

This morning, hundreds of hotel workers from the Hyatt Regency, Westin Bayshore and Pinnacle Harbourfront hotels, represented by UNITE HERE Local 40, walked off the job in an open-ended strike. This escalation in the dispute follows a lunch hour strike held on Tuesday. After fourteen months of bargaining the hotels have failed to address significant outstanding issues related to workload, safety and job security. Room attendants, chefs, front desk agents and other staff of the high-end hotels are holding downtown strike actions for the first time in nearly two decades, united in their fight to change the industry into one which offers safe, stable and sustainable jobs.

The workers are demanding “One job should be enough!” in Vancouver’s booming hospitality industry which makes record profits year after year, while the cost of living continues to rise in Metro Vancouver. Many of the city’s hotel workers are struggling to provide for their families with precarious, on-call shifts caused by the systemic cutting of hours in these hotels. Safety remains a priority in this dispute, as many workers have stepped forward with complaints of sexual harassment faced on the job, and extreme under-staffing has led to unsafe and unsustainable workload levels. Vancouver’s downtown hotel workers stand together for better quality jobs and an improved quality of life.

Picket Actions

Date: Thursday, Sept 19, 2019

Time: 7:00 AM

Where: Hyatt Regency, Westin Bayshore, Pinnacle Harbourfront hotels

###

Contact: Sharan Pawa, 604-725-0053, [email protected]