How an act of defiance by Air Canada's flight attendants was a win for labour rights

CBC

a day ago

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The successful defiance of a hotly contested piece of Canada's Labour Code has boosted hope for worker rights in the country, labour advocates say.
The union and its thousands of striking Air Canada flight attendants refused to go back to work after the federal government invoked the Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code.
As a result, Air Canada returned to the bargaining table and overnight the two parties came to a tentative agreement that the 10,500 flight attendants in the union will soon be able to vote on.
"This is a big win for flight attendant that's going to force the federal government to re-evaluate how it intervenes in labour disputes going forward," said Larry Savage, a professor of labour studies at Brock University.
"The ministers' back-to-work order backfired spectacularly."
CBC has learned that the first year of the deal would give a 12 per cent salary bump to flight attendants in their first five years on the job and eight per cent for those with six or more years of experience. In the second year, employees would see another three per cent increase, followed by a 2.5 per cent increase the year after that.
One of the biggest issues, which galvanized public sympathy, was the fact that flight attendants at Air Canada and other airlines are not paid for much of the time that they spend helping passengers while on the ground.
Under the new deal, attendants would receive 50 per cent of their salary for 60 minutes of boarding and cabin secure checks for narrow body planes and 70 minutes for wide body planes. That amount would increase by five per cent every year of the agreement.
Union says Air Canada expected government intervention
The agreement took about seven hours but followed eight months of bargaining, says Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) national president Mark Hancock.
Hancock said it had recently became clear that Air Canada was expecting the federal government to force flight attendants back to work without coming to a collective agreement, just as it had done with postal workers last fall.
"We definitely noticed a change in the employer," Hancock said in a phone interview Tuesday. "We were thinking that, OK, they're probably going to bring 107."
Just 12 hours into the strike that began Saturday, Jobs Minister Patty Hajdu invoked Section 107, which allows the minister to order binding arbitration and end work stoppages.
The provision had seldom been used up until 2024, when the Liberals invoked it in the ports and railways strikes, then again during the Canada Post strike.
What is Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code?
3 days ago
When it was invoked again on the weekend, labour rights activists began worrying that the government's reliance on this action — instead of passing back-to-work legislation through Parliament — would undermine both collective bargaining and the overall right of workers to strike in this country.
"It actually is corrosive to the very practice and the principle of free voluntary collective bargaining," said Chris Roberts, social and economic policy director at the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC).
But this time, something different happened.
On Monday, Hancock announced that striking flight attendants would remain on the picket line despite the back-to-work order by Canada's labour board, which was triggered by Hajdu's invoking of Section 107.
"If it means folks like me going to jail, so be it," Hancock said in remarks that made headlines across the country.
"Our members were ready for the long haul," he added Tuesday,
Roberts said he was also aware that Air Canada was stalling during talks and had "instead turned its attention to urging the government to trigger 107."
The labour congress's president, Bea Bruske, said she believes employers will no longer be able to expect this kind of intervention.
"Employers should not ever think that government can bail them out," she said.
Issue of unpaid work resonated
As the threat of a strike or lockout approached, CUPE realized its members had the public's support, said Savage, the Brock University professor whose research has focused on the politics of organized labour in Canada.
"There was something about these flight attendants, the particular issue that they were fighting about related to unpaid work, [that] resonated so strongly with so many," said Savage.
Between that and the speed with which Hajdu invoked Section 107, Air Canada was quick to return to the table, he said.
There have been other recent governments' efforts to intervene in labour disputes or limiting workers' right to strike. In Ontario, Premier Doug Ford's 2022 introduction, then repeal, of Bill 28 followed an outcry by several different unions; elsewhere, Quebec's Bill 89 is being challenged by four McGill University faculty associations.
In each case, Savage says there has been public pushback to attempts by Canadian governments to overstep labour rights.
"When governments stack the deck in favour of employers, unions are going to resist. Workers are going to use their leverage to insist on negotiated settlements, even if that means ignoring the law," he said.