Amina Ali and her former co-workers stood out amid the hustle and bustle of a Thursday lunch rush in the Union Station food court as they held bright neon signs and handed out flyers.
“No warning! No notice! No severance!” read one of the signs. “STOLEN JOBS” read another, all caps.
Passersby stopped to take videos and photos, while others walked up to the group of eight workers to ask what was happening. “That sucks,” one woman said after talking to a protester holding an “INJUSTICE TO WORKERS!!!” sign.
Just a week prior, the team — which included some university students working part-time as well as parents working full-time to support their kids — would’ve been serving the crowd of office workers and tourists mingling about from behind the counter at the Union Station location of Sushi Shop, a fast-food chain commonly found in mall food courts.
But on March 27, Ali and the others were protesting outside their former workplace to raise awareness around what they described as an “injustice” after Sushi Shop’s corporate owner and Canadian franchisor, MTY Food Group, allegedly changed the locks and fired all the staff when it abruptly ended its agreement with the franchise owner a week earlier.
The store reopened days later after the lockout under new management — allegedly with entirely new staff.
“We’re not here to fight anyone,” Ali, the former Union Station Sushi Shop manager and employee for eight years, told the Star at the March demonstration. “We’re just here to get our jobs back.”
The demonstration outside the Union Station Sushi Shop took place as a handful of other of the chain’s downtown Toronto locations allegedly shut down without notice last month, former franchise owners told the Star.
Along with the Union Station location — which was allegedly taken over by MTY on March 18 — Sushi Shops at Brookfield Place, Southcore Financial Centre and Women’s College Hospital were also suddenly closed by MTY, according to Allen Alizada, the former franchisee of the Union Station location.
Only the Union Station location appears to have reopened since the end of the franchise agreements. The remaining three locations are no longer on Sushi Shop’s website, despite appearing on an archived page from Nov. 5 last year. Google also lists all three of these stores as “permanently closed.”
MTY, which is based in Montreal and operates many other popular fast-food outlets such as Thai Express and Mr. Sub, did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the Star.
“It’s quite heartbreaking honestly,” said Alizada, who owned his Sushi Shop for 13 years under an agreement with MTY. “Who would have imagined their business to be taken over overnight? It’s the worst thing you can actually imagine.”
According to Alizada, there was no warning of the takeover; he only got an email from MTY officially ending the franchise agreement on the same day the company allegedly locked him and his employees out.
Jingbo Zhou, who owned the Women’s College Hospital Sushi Shop for 10 years under an agreement with MTY, said it felt like MTY was “taking over everything from us.” He, too, said there was no warning when the store was taken over on March 18, the same day as the Union Station location.
Zhou later learned his franchise agreement with MTY lays out how the company could take immediate ownership of his restaurant, but he described the situation as “not fair” given that the document is roughly 200 pages long.
“It’s harsh to do it this way,” Zhou said. Alizada also said his franchise agreement allowed for MTY to take over the store.
As for why the agreements for these locations were allegedly terminated so suddenly, Alizada said he had not been given a reason from MTY and had been unable to contact someone from the head office as of March 19.
Zhou said he got a letter from the company after the closure citing a “food health issue” — a surprise since he said it hadn’t come up during any of the previous MTY-led inspections.
“We’ve run the same style for 10 years,” Zhou said, “and we haven’t been told about changing anything.”
While Ali feels bad for Alizada, her former boss — the feeling is mutual, with Alizada expressing concern for his former staff while speaking with the Star — she said the demonstration was just focused on the employees.
“We have mortgages to pay, we have rent to pay, we have kids,” Ali said, noting that Alizada made sure to pay staff their remaining wages. (Alizada said he also paid staff “extra for helping out for all these years,” but did not specify an amount.)
Ali added that now felt a particularly bad time to be unemployed.
“We’ve all applied for new jobs, but again the job market is bad so no one’s getting back to us. We’re so frustrated.”
Despite suddenly finding themselves without a job, Ali and the other former Sushi Shop staff do have some protections when it comes to compensation, according to Bram Lecker, an employment lawyer and principal at Toronto-based Lecker & Associates.
At a minimum, Lecker explained, the former employees are entitled to up to eight weeks’ worth of pay under the provincial Employment Standards Act depending on their length of employment. They should also receive severance payments covering up to 26 weeks of pay, also depending on how long they worked for Sushi Shop.
“As long as a company is around and solvent, they will get the money,” Lecker said.
Former employees could also file a wrongful dismissal claim through small claims court if they were to be rehired, Lecker said. According to the employment lawyer, franchisors can get a franchise to fire its employees before a takeover then later rehire the staff as new employees under a new contract so they are not entitled to very much.
This new contract, Lecker said, is used to “screw staff out of their wrongful dismissal position.”
“That’s what employees have to be very, very careful about,” Lecker said, adding employees are not obligated to sign a new contract. “Do not sign a contract until you show it to somebody.”
During the March demonstration, the new franchise owner of the Union Station location and a representative from MTY pulled Ali aside, offering to give the protesters a job interview if they sent their resumes to an email associated with MTY catering.
The Star had not heard from Ali if the protesting staff had gotten an interview, or been rehired, by the time of publication.
Ali told the Star at the demonstration that she is holding out hope they’ll hear back but already “knows for a fact” that she nor any of her former co-workers will be rehired.
“They went out of their way to hire new people with no experience,” she said, “so why now?”
