Kowloon House workers strike over three-year-delayed wage increase

At Kowloon House’s West Avenue branch in Quezon City, workers walked off the job and called for a boycott on April 15, putting pressure on a restaurant business that sells about 6,000 siopao and siomai a day across that branch and 103 others nationwide. The dispute now reaches beyond one storefront: it threatens daily service, customer confidence, and the pay of more than 60 union members who say they have spent years trying to force management to honor their contract.

The fight centers on a P25 daily wage increase that workers say was supposed to be enforced under a collective bargaining agreement signed in August 2021. Katipunan Food Services Inc., the company operating Kowloon House, has offered P13 a day instead, less than half of what the union says the agreement requires. In March, the same dispute had already hardened, with management offering only P10 while workers were asking for P35. The union staged a break-time protest on March 6, and a notice of strike followed that same month.

By April 16, the talks were still stuck. Workers and management met with the Department of Labor and Employment, but the session deadlocked, extending a dispute that Bulatlat said should have been addressed when the next round of CBA talks was due in August 2025. For cooks, servers, and back-of-house staff, the message is blunt: a signed contract means little if management can stall implementation for years.

The Center for Trade Union and Human Rights said the workers estimate P5.5 million in unpaid wages and benefits, plus P500,000 in service charges. It also said workers had already faced delays in bargaining, intimidation, sanctions, and an alleged attempt by management to use an adjacent business called KMN to limit protests at the site. The union says the issue is not a perk or a future raise, but money already earned and delayed.

That is what makes the Kowloon House dispute so combustible in a restaurant industry where margins are tight and wage increases are often fought inch by inch. Bulatlat reported that most of the union members have worked at the company for more than a decade, and that the P25 demand works out to about P1,500 a month, or roughly 25 centavos per siopao. The workers’ case also lands against a broader living-wage benchmark: IBON Foundation put the daily living wage for a family of five at P1,253 in January 2026.