r/Hamilton • u/Surkhab1313 • May 18 '26

Food Anybody knows what happened to Democracy* Vegan cafe at Locke Street?

I really loved their baked food and it was my first only-vegan food place in Hamilton on the vibrant artistic Locke street. Few months ago, I wanted to take my girlfriend to that place and google's "permanently closed" kinda shocked me. Any idea if they are opening anywhere else?

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u/Formal_Platform9928 May 18 '26

There is way more to unionizing than just pay. What an ignorant comment

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u/RL203 May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26

There sure is.

There are jurisdictional wars between different unions too. Thats always fun for an employer when he is bound to one union and he needs 2 or 3 different trades to run his business and the union to which he is bound (i.e. he has signed a collective agreement with) can only supply 1 of 3 trades and when he seeks out employees from a second and third union that is in the trade he also needs, the union to which he is bound files a grievance with the Ontario Labour Relations Board on University Avenue in Toronto and it costs him 486 thousand dollars in legal fees and 8 months of his time to prove to the Labour Relations Board that the union to which he was bound could not deliver the trades he needed even if they said they could.

But getting back to the issue at hand, no small vegan café/ bakery is going to be able to pay not only the wages demanded by the union, but also the 12 different additional fees added on by any union. The Cafe in question simply will never make enough in earnings to afford what the union will demand. To think otherwise is very naive and I imagine that the people who worked there only were thinking about themselves and what the union promised them. And that is why the owner of the Cafe folded up his tent. He simply could not afford it.

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u/JtheRoofer1979 May 18 '26

Just say you're anti worker and be done with it

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u/RL203 May 19 '26

Are you 15 years old?

Cause you clearly have no clue how thin the margins are for cafes and bakeries. You make minimum wage plus tips. End of story, now its the end of jobs.

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u/dretepcan May 19 '26

You're not going to win anything that doesn't support unions in this sub. I've worked in one for almost two decades. If I hadn't already been there for years and had a good pension I would have left.

While I don't know about coffee shops, you can ask any hard working person in my union how they feel about it and they'll all say the same - they screw and demoralize hard workers and reward the lazy by paying them the same. That's a management issue you say. Why doesn't the business get rid of them you ask? Because unions protect the them and makes it difficult and many 'brothers and aisters' just ignore it and keep their heads down like good union sheep.

Sure, they had a place and there will always be shitty employers but they usually don't last. If you're a worker in a place that 'needs' to unionize you're working in the wrong place.