Some former Montreal restaurant workers don't plan to go back as province reopens dining rooms

Restaurants in Quebec will be allowed to reopen Monday for the first time in more than a month, but some former workers say they won't be looking for new jobs in the industry.

Milovan Danielou said he decided to start looking for a new job during the province's second closure of restaurant dining rooms in the fall of 2020, when his then-employer, taco restaurant Grumman '78, closed its main location permanently.

With dining rooms closed and no tourists in the city, there was little work to go around. "Everybody was fighting to find even part-time jobs,'' he said in a recent interview.

Danielou, who now does data entry, said his new job is less interesting, but the $30-an-hour pay is better, and he's not worried about losing his job if the COVID-19 situation worsens.

"Nothing compares to restaurant work, the rush, the drive, the energy, the team, the people you meet. Nothing compares to that,'' he said. But it's not enough to draw him back. "You have to pay your rent, you have to survive.''

Quebec restaurant dining rooms were ordered closed starting Dec. 20 as the number of COVID-19 cases in the province shot up. Under the new rules, restaurants will be able to open Monday at 50 per cent capacity and there will be limits on how many people from different households can share a table.

Liam Thomas, 32, said that while he decided to leave the industry last summer, when restaurants were open, it wasn't a choice he would have made if he hadn't already lived through two lockdowns.

"I was being yelled at for the millionth time in my cooking career and I just walked out and I never went back,'' Thomas, a former line cook, said in a recent interview. "It was precipitated by the lockdowns and the knowledge that could happen again, and the instability of the work.''

Thomas, who said he started working in restaurants at 18, now works as a transport attendant at a Montreal hospital, helping patients get to X-rays and other appointments within the hospital.

While Thomas said he still sometimes misses the rush of the kitchen, his new job is less stressful, better paid and offers more vacation time.

"The issues that the pandemic exposed were always there for restaurant workers,'' said Kaitlin Doucette of the Canadian Restaurant Workers Coalition, a group that advocates for better working conditions in the industry. She said workers have long lacked health benefits and paid sick days, and that the precarious nature of work in the industry can lead to abuse and sexual harassment.

One of the biggest challenges of the latest closure in Quebec, Doucette said in a recent interview, is that workers were only eligible for $300 a week in federal aid.

Montrealer Michèle Martel, who worked in bars for 25 years, said she started looking for a new job because that wasn't enough to live on.

"I had no choice. With the amount of money they're giving us, my savings would have disappeared for a third time. It's hard to save money, and when the closings come, the money melts away,'' she said. "And it's not just financial, I also need to work for my morale, to see people.''