Flight attendants at Canada’s largest airline have defied the might of the Canadian federal government in an effort to set an industry-wide standard against unpaid labor. Negotiations are reportedly ongoing, and a settlement may be close, though workers have made it clear they will not compromise on fair pay for unpaid labor.
Air Canada, founded as a publicly owned airline in 1936 and sold off during Brian Mulroney’s privatization drive in 1989, employs more than ten thousand flight attendants represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). Mulroney, like Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, eagerly embraced the free-market zeal of the 1980s, pushing state assets into private hands.
Historically, flight attendants across the airline industry have only been paid for their labor between takeoff and landing. This leaves “ground work” — including pre-flight briefings, safety checks, helping passengers find their seats, and the Tetris-like task of packing luggage into overhead compartments — uncompensated.
“It’s an anomaly. No other industry would treat workers that way,” Steven Tufts, a labor geographer at York University in Toronto told the Globe and Mail. “They got away with it for a number of years until people realized how unfair it was . . . especially coming out of the pandemic, when flight attendants were sitting on the tarmac for five hours for a two-hour flight.”
CUPE’s Air Canada Component, negotiating its first new contract in a decade, insists that workers need a pay increase…
Auteur: Jeremy Appel
