In the 1960s and 70s revised immigration laws allowed more South Asian women to
In the 1960s and 70s revised immigration laws allowed more South Asian women to enter Canada. The economy was changing too: jobs were disappearing in resource based industries like forestry. The service economy was growing. Union membership declined among private sector workers but grew in the expanding public sector, which also gained bargaining rights.
Some of these newly arrived South Asian women had marketable skills and education, often with English language skills and university-level educations – they were able to enter fields such as social work, teaching, nursing, office administration and more.
Still, many women who did not have these advantages and were limited to low-skilled and low-paid in-service work: in hotel and restaurant kitchens, cleaners and farmworkers.
Working class women’s entry to the paid labour force was often mediated by their roles as mothers and wives. On occasion it was the male household members who were IWA union members in sawmills and knew the benefits of belonging to a union who encouraged their spouses to join unions as well.
Marie Decaire, former Secretary-Treasurer of Hotel, Restaurant, Culinary Employees and Bartenders Union Local 40, one of the oldest unions in British Columbia (now known as UNITE HERE! Local 40), estimates that 15% of the membership was South Asian when she was on the executive. This membership represented workers in virtually every form of hospitality, restaurant and service industry throughout British Columbia and the Yukon. She worked alongside Rishi Sharma, an executive member originally from Fiji, who was elected chief shop steward by workers at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Vancouver. Many Local 40 members were women and new immigrants from the wider South Asian diaspora, and were active in the union.
“I made my way up the narrow, winding road to Lillooet and when I got there, I contacted the shop steward and the shop steward set up a meeting and it turned out the shop steward was indeed Indo-Canadian and Punjabi out of the Punjab originally, although I think probably second generation; and the crew to be organised were indeed the wives, sisters, daughters and so on of Indo-Canadians living in and around the Lillooet area and primarily wanting the protection, wages and benefits that they (male family members) enjoyed in the IWA that were not available to the workers. In any event, I then, of course, went about busily trying to sign check-off cards and all these folk, they were mostly housekeeping kitchen staff and maintenance. And just overall cleaning staff at the hotel.”
“…Being in a union, being in the IWA and standing up for your rights was the way of Canadian life for them. And and you know, a lot of them had socialist backgrounds. I mean, there was the socialism that came with them. They were renegades in their own country anyway. And so there was a meshing of philosophy, if you will, between the labour movement and South Asian Canadian workers generally.”[1]
Surjit Brar worked i