"Unions Aren't Native": The Muckamuck Restaurant Labour Dispute, Vancouver, B.C. (1978-1983)

Abstract

In THIS SOCIETY, explained First Nations union organizer Ethel Gardner to a skeptical First Nations community, being in a union is the only way we can guarantee that our rights as workers will be respected.1 Ethel was an employee at the Muckamuck restaurant in Vancouver, British Columbia when its First Nations workers decided to organize into an independent feminist union in 1978 and subsequently struck for a first contract against white American owners. The dispute allied First Nations people with predominantly white trade unionists and made an even wider community aware of their circumstances. The union picketed the restaurant for three years, discouraging customers from entering, while the owners kept the restaurant functioning with the use of strikebreakers, many of them from the First Nations community. When the owners closed their operation in 1981, the union ceased picketing and both parties waited a further two years for a legal ruling from the Labour Relations Board. Finally in 1983, the owners were ordered to pay remedies to the union, but sold the restaurant and pulled all their assets out of Canada, refusing to comply with the decision. The following case study of this dispute will include an examination of the role of the First Nations community, organized labour, the employer and the government. This case study draws on archival materials and other sources as well as my own recollections as a former organizer and clerical worker in the union which organized the Muckamuck workers and as a regular on the Muckamuck picket line. My perspective is as a white feminist trade unionist, sensitive to ethnicity because of a Lebanese/Scottish heritage. This story has yet to be written from the First Nations strikers' cultural and political vantage point.