Majority of lowest earners in hotel sector are immigrants, women, visible minorities with little chance of job advancement

When Linette Brown began working as a housekeeper at a Toronto hotel in 1973, she earned 95 cents an hour, rent for her two-bedroom apartment in North York was $250 a month and a TTC token cost a quarter.

Now, in her early 60s, she makes $15 an hour as a maintenance worker at the same hotel.

But while her income's gone up, so has the cost of living, and Brown says she considers herself just as impoverished now as back then, paying more for her apartment, transportation and other expenses.

After three decades in the industry, Brown laments "I'm still `working poor,' like most other hotel workers."
According to a report to be released today by the union-led Task Force on the Toronto Hotel Industry, Brown has lots of company. Of the 30,000 people who work in Greater Toronto hotels, 70 per cent are immigrants.

To a large degree, poverty in the industry is segmented along race and gender lines. Among its lowest earners, room attendants and laundry workers, 93 per cent are immigrants; 82 per cent are visible minorities; and 80 per cent are women.

The report recommends:

• Setting up a city-wide training centre using negotiated contributions from hotel chains and governments.
• Measures that provide flexible working hours, personal days, workplace child care and extended parental leave and benefits.
• Affordable housing, child care and transit initiatives, and subsidized transit passes like those offered at the Fairmont Royal York, Starwood and Hilton hotels.
• Equity programs to eliminate "job ghettos" based on race and gender, to give marginalized groups more advancement opportunities.
• Extending the right to union representation for hotel workers.

LINK: Complete story at the Toronto Star