Case Study 1

Women’s Labour History: Restaurant Work in the Vancouver Area

Women’s Labour History: Restaurant Work in the Vancouver Area investigates women’s labour in the restaurant sector in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1970s, considering historical precedents, and the broader context of work, society, and labour organization. These decades were chosen because of significant differences in sector demographics, working conditions, political formations; and forms of labour organization, such as craft, industrial and independent feminist, and Indigenous unionism. Our research examines the ways that communities are constructed around, support, or intersect with the sector; issues of race and exclusion; as well as correlations between restaurant and domestic work. We consider the documentation of this labour force and the ways that its representation changed across decades. We examine the ways that restaurant workers exert a presence within archives (government, academic, and community-based). What collections are contained there, who were the collectors, who described the fonds and what networks exist between collections that can inform the subject? Item sets are organized according to Background Documents, Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union, HREU Local 28 1930s - 1940s which include sets that hold objects collected from various archives that represent Restaurant Organizing, Hotel Organizing, Communism and Unions, and Anti-Asian racism; and Service, Office, and Retail Workers Union of Canada, SORWUC 1970s – 1980s. Records derive from fonds at SFU Archives, City of Vancouver Archives, UBC Special Collections, BC Labour Heritage Centre, and VIVO.