Karen's employer moved to a new house that did not have an apartment. He looked for an apartment for Karen, but everything was too expensive. Karen began to work for another brother of her employer. Her working conditions got better. Karen still waited for the Department of Labour hearing about the job she had left. At this hearing, Karen and her former employer would tell their sides of the story. Then the Department of Labour would decide if the employer had broken the law. If he had, the Department of Labour would also decide what should be done about it. While she was waiting, Karen decided she wanted a lawyer. "I knew for a fact that [people] have a lawyer on hand. A business man will have a lawyer. So of course I [wanted to have] a lawyer, and someone who is involved in labour [issues]." She met a legal aid lawyer, Dennis MacKay. He became her lawyer.

Karen and her lawyer waited years for a hearing to investigate her former employer. Three or four days would be set aside for the hearing by the Department of Labour. Then Karen's former employer would make an excuse, and the hearing was put off for months.

The Household Services Co-op

In the meantime, Karen's salary went down. She found she was making about $75 a week, and working ten hours a day. Karen met other women with the same problems. These women did not have a union to represent them. When they felt they were being treated unfairly, they did not know who to talk to. One of these women worked 124 hours in one week. She did housework and looked after children. When she added up her pay, she had only made $1.05 an hour.

Karen and four other women decided things might be better if they could run their own housekeeping business. Then they would work for themselves. They formed a workers' co-operative called Household Services Co-op. A workers' cooperative is a business that provides its members with jobs. The people who own the business are also the people who work in it.

It took a lot of work to put Household Services Co-op together. The women had to write a business plan and apply for loans. They could not get a loan from a bank or any government agency. They got a small start-up loan from PLURA, an inter-denominational church group. (Inter-denominational means that different churches, such as Catholic and Protestant, belong to the group.) After three years of planning, in September of 1988, Karen and her friends opened their business.

Household Services Co-op ran for about a year and a half, but it did not succeed. The cleaning jobs were too far apart. It was hard to get a vendor's permit that would let them buy supplies and equipment at wholesale rates. (A vendor's permit shows that you are buying things for your business. It lets you buy at places that sell to businesses more cheaply.) There were also problems with management and organization. But Karen learned a lot even though the business did not work out.