“My former employer was ordered to pay me and my co-workers $115,000 in unpaid wages. More than a year later, we’re still waiting”

I immigrated to Canada as a refugee in October of 2023. I left Nigeria because it was no longer safe for me to be there as a queer man. I had worked in construction and had around $200 in savings when I arrived. I relied on financial support from my friends and the $730-per-month stipend I received from the Canadian government as a refugee claimant to resettle in Toronto.

As soon as I received my work permit, I began looking for a job. An acquaintance referred me to his employer, Sunrise Caribbean, a local restaurant chain. He told me to text one of the managers, a woman named Shanny, who replied that I could start immediately. I just had to attend two days of unpaid training at a branch of the restaurant. She promised to pay me $12 an hour to work in the kitchen—I didn’t realize until much later that the minimum wage was then $16.55 per hour. I was just grateful to have a job offer so quickly after arriving in Canada.

I started at Sunrise in December of 2023. Each restaurant was staffed by just two people: one in the front of house and one in the back. As a kitchen worker, I was responsible for reheating food and washing dishes. I also had to arrange deliveries in the walk-in fridge and haul bags of trash to the dumpsters in the back. It was a lot for one person to handle, and the kitchen was sweltering, but I needed the money.

Shanny added me to a group chat on Instagram. The restaurant owner moderated the chat and used the group to coordinate shifts. I rotated between three locations: one on Jane and Finch, another at Jane and Wilson, and a third in Mississauga. It took me 45 minutes to commute by bus to the locations on Jane Street. I had to take a bus, a subway and another bus to get to Mississauga, a trip that took about two hours each way. Few workers wanted to commute to the Mississauga location because it was so far from where most of us lived, but I did it because I was new and I wanted to show that I could go above and beyond. One evening, I left the Mississauga branch at 10 p.m. and took the wrong bus. By the time I realized that I didn’t recognize my surroundings, my phone had died and it had begun to snow. I was freezing and lost, and the streets were empty. Eventually, some guys pointed me in the right direction. By the time I made it home, it was 4 a.m. I went back to work the next day.

I typically worked twelve-hour shifts, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., and I worked every day of the week. I even worked through Christmas and Boxing Day. I received my first paycheque in the second week of January, for $1,100, a little less than a third of the wages I was owed for hours worked in December. The cheque bounced, which I found strange, but I successfully cashed the make-up cheque that the manager issued a week later. By then, we were deep into the coldest winter I had ever experienced, but a friend had lent me a coat and I had found a place to live. I felt like I was finally settling into my new life in Canada.

Related: Ontario’s integrity commissioner is investigating the $2.5-billion Skills Development Fund

Things began to go awry after that. I kept working gruelling hours every day, but the rest of January came and went without me seeing another cent of wages. I messaged the owner, but he was evasive. I got a cheque in early February, but it again covered less than a third of what I was owed, which was almost $3,500 at that point. Since I’d started working, I hadn’t had a single day off. I used my government stipend to cover the $450 per month I paid for a room I shared with another person, and I often relied on the food bank to feed myself. I was exhausted and angry, and I complained again. They sent me another cheque.

At that point, I had constant headaches from the long hours. I told my manager that, in addition to back pay, I needed at least one day off a week. I asked for Friday because I’m Muslim and I wanted to start going to a mosque again. They said no because Fridays were busy, so we agreed on Tuesdays. But, the following Monday night, the manager sent me a message asking me to go in again the next day. I declined, and he fired me and blocked me on Instagram. He also cancelled the last cheque before I could deposit it.

I was shocked and angry, but it felt like there was nothing I could do. I had few friends in the city, and I had already asked them for so much—I didn’t want to bother them with more of my problems. Those months in early 2024 were terrible. I was so desperate that I had to ask for money from friends and family back in Nigeria. I started looking for other jobs, but there were few openings, and all of my applications went unanswered. I reached out to an employment agency, which channelled me into personal support work. I signed up for a training program to become a personal or disability support worker, which cost around $6,000. It was steep, but I figured it was an investment in my future. I begged my roommate to cover my portion of the rent, promising that I would pay him back as soon as I finished the course and got a stable job. This freed up the financial support I received from the government to pay the course fees. But, halfway through the program, I got so sick that I needed surgery. I couldn’t finish the course after that, both because I’d missed classes when I was on bed rest and because, after paying for some prescription medicine, I could no longer afford the tuition.

One day, I ran into an old co-worker. I found out that she was also no longer working at Sunrise Caribbean, and we commiserated over how poorly we had been treated. A few days later, she called me and told me that she had connected with a workers’ rights non-profit, the Workers’ Action Centre, which was willing to take up the cause of the workers at Sunrise Caribbean. The WAC told us that we needed strength in numbers, so we started looking for other former workers. I called more of my old co-workers, including a woman who used to be a doctor in Nigeria. She said that Sunrise Caribbean also hadn’t paid her all of what she was owed, and if they didn’t do so by the end of the month, she was going to get evicted. Even so, she was too scared to get involved. Months later, when I tried to reach out to her again, I found that her phone had been disconnected. The vast majority of people who worked for Sunrise lived in precarity, whether because they were refugees or because they were international students with uncertain immigration status. Many of them were hesitant to speak up because they were afraid of retaliation. But, with the WAC’s support, we eventually rallied a group of thirteen former workers.

We staged the first of many protests in the summer of 2024 outside the Sunrise Caribbean at Wilson Avenue. We discovered that the problem was even bigger than we’d thought. Several people who walked by told us that they used to work at Sunrise Caribbean and never got paid, or they had family members who were still waiting to get paid. We mounted another protest in Ajax in October. Someone filmed the protest and posted it on TikTok, where it went viral: the video has 12,400 likes to date. The video even reached people in Nigeria through the TikTok algorithm, who were shocked that this kind of thing could happen in Canada.

In between protests, we repeatedly attempted to contact the owner, who kept avoiding us. Eventually, he agreed to get on a call to hear us out. But, on the day of the call, he ghosted us. We had no choice but to file a complaint with the Ministry of Labour in November of 2024—almost a full year after I’d started working at Sunrise.

Three months later, in February of 2025, we received a Ministry of Labour ruling. The employment standards officer determined that Sunrise Caribbean owed the thirteen former employees nearly $115,000 in wages plus $133,000 in damages—around $250,000 in total. My share came to more than $10,000 in wages and $20,000 in damages. It felt so validating to have the official documentation in front of me. I thought about what a huge difference that money would make for my quality of life. But it quickly became clear that the fight wasn’t over. Getting the order to pay was one thing; actually getting paid was another.

The owner hired a paralegal to try to negotiate with us. Eventually, we agreed to settle for 70 per cent of the total amount owed, figuring that a reduced sum would mean we were more likely to get paid. But, after the negotiations, Sunrise Caribbean stopped answering messages. We reported this to the Ministry of Labour, and in November of 2025, we organized rallies in front of the ministry, but still nothing came of it.

I wish that this were a rare situation, but these struggles are shockingly common in Ontario. Over the past decade, the Ministry of Labour has identified nearly $200 million in unpaid wages. Yet there have been few consequences for negligent employers. The ministry could theoretically prosecute the business owners, which could lead to heavy fines or jail time. But the number of prosecutions initiated against negligent employers dropped 85 per cent between 2017 and 2024. The Ontario government has not made stopping wage theft a priority. Instead, according to the WAC, employment standards officers pursue prosecution only in the most egregious cases—worse than $250,000. This gives employers free rein to take advantage of workers, including those who are refugees and have already endured so much just to come to Canada.

Related: Canada’s population declined last year, and Ontario felt it hard

These days, I’m working in construction on a temporary basis. I am 56, and most days I get home from work with some kind of pain in my body. Thirty thousand dollars would change my life. It would give me the much-needed stability to pursue a more long-term career in Canada. I could restart my support work program, which would put me on the path to more stable employment.

When I fled Nigeria, I believed that I had left behind a corrupt state that rendered laws meaningless and enabled the abuse of its most marginalized residents: refugees, recent immigrants, the poor. But this experience in Canada has made me afraid for the future of my adoptive country—and less sure that I’ve left all that behind.

Editor’s note: Sunrise Caribbean did not respond to Toronto Life’s request for comment.