Jackie Ainsworth

In the summer of 1971 I was 20 years old and working as a waitress at Smitty’s Pancake House in Vancouver. I had recently decided not to return to university. There was a lot happening in the world that interested me more than going to school. Demonstrations against the war in Vietnam were happening almost daily it seemed and Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem were becoming household names.

I had been working in restaurants since I was 16, first part-time while going to school and then full-time. I was fed up with arbitrary shift scheduling, split shifts, low wages, mandatory staff meetings with no pay, and the demeaning and disrespectful attitude of managers and customers alike. I wasn’t the only one. In September 1971, several waitresses at Smitty’s decided to approach the manager to discuss the fact that our wages were too low to live on. There were five of us in the meeting. The manager said he had a solution to our problem. He said we needed to increase our tips by removing our wedding rings and shortening our skirts.

As I walked home from that meeting seething with anger I stopped at a phone booth and looked up “unions” in the yellow pages. Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union looked like the right one. I called them and set up a meeting for the following day. My dad had always been in a union and our household had endured a couple of long strikes. Though my dad wasn’t an activist, we always knew which side we were on.

Shortly after signing up my co-workers into the union, I was fired from Smitty’s. While drowning my sorrows at a movie (I had smuggled a bottle of Southern Comfort into the theatre) I met a woman named D. J. O’Donnell. She was sitting in the seat behind me and I ended up passing her my bottle. She not only enjoyed my Southern Comfort but, it turns out, she was attending the founding convention the next morning of the “Working Women’s Association.” I told her about Smitty’s. She seemed oddly excited about my story. I didn’t understand. I was just a waitress in a crummy pancake house. But she suggested I meet with a friend of hers, Jean Rands, who might help me file an unfair labour practice complaint over my firing. She gave me Jean’s phone number. Unbeknownst to me, D.J. was a feminist activist and a member of Vancouver Women’s Caucus. A rather serendipitous meeting!

I met with Jean Rands a couple of days later and she invited me to the first meeting of the Working Women’s Association at the Vancouver Public Library the following week. I was hesitant but decided to go. I would just sit in the back and observe. I walked into the meeting room a little late. The meeting had started and Jean was chairing it. She saw me come in announced “Oh good, you’re here. You’re next on the agenda.” That meeting changed my life and many of the women in that room became my life long friends and sisters in the struggle for women’s liberation. For the next 20 years I was active in organizing feminist unions in my workplaces in the restaurant and banking industries. In the late 1980’s when my health required a leave from work, I was active in the struggle for a free-standing abortion clinic in Vancouver.

I am currently retired after working in the banking industry for almost 40 years. I live on Vancouver Island where I am active in my community protecting our watershed and I often travel to Vancouver to join in women’s marches, anti-pipeline protests and to visit some of those life-long friends.

In 1973 I got a job at the biomedical library at UBC. I was a founding member of AUCE, was active in the organizing drive, was on the negotiating committee for the first contract that negotiated precedent setting rights for women workers and I was the first paid official of the union. Organizing AUCE at UBC was one of the seminal experiences of my life. It was there that I experienced for the first time what was possible when we came together in a democratic union and demanded our rights as women and workers.

Watch the video or read the transcript of Jackie’s personal story posted on the BC Labour Heritage Centre’s Oral History Collection.