Flight Attendants Won’t Let Air Canada Profit From Unpaid Labor
Air Canada’s flight attendants have defied Ottawa’s back-to-work order, striking for pay they’ve never received for pre- and post-flight duties, from safety checks to restocking. The action exposes decades of unpaid work baked into airline operations.
National president of CUPE Mark Hancock raises his fist in the air while speaking to striking Air Canada flight attendants at Pearson international airport. (Nick Lachance / Toronto Star via Getty Images)
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.”
Government Orders Flight Attendants Back to Work
CUPE’s Air Canada Component, negotiating its first new contract in a decade, insists that workers need a pay increase roughly matching the 28 percent compounded inflation since their last contract, and that this wage should apply to all labor, whether the plane is in the air or not.
Air Canada refused to budge from its position of a compounded pay increase of 17 percent over four years and only 50 percent compensation for ground work. In response, CUPE gave its required seventy-two-hours strike notice on August 13.
The employer responded by issuing a lockout notice to CUPE beginning August 16 — the same day the strike was supposed to begin — canceling hundreds of flights, apparently banking on thousands of stranded passengers blaming the flight attendants for their predicament.
On August 17, after the workers were on the picket line for one day, Jobs Minister Patty Hajdu — there’s no labor minister in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government — invoked section 107 of Canada’s labor code, which gives the government wide latitude to end labor action to “maintain or secure industrial peace.”
Imposing binding arbitration, Hajdu instructed the nominally arms-length Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) to order the workers off the picket lines. On the morning of August 18, CIRB declared continued strike action “unlawful.”
Asked in an interview with BNN Bloomberg whether the airline made any contingency plans for stranded passengers, Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau admitted that his company was counting on the federal government using the code’s section 107. Predictably, such a strategy has inspired little confidence and the comments go a long way in explaining why Canadians have even less faith in their national airlines than Americans do in theirs.
Trevor McFadyen, who teaches human resources at Capilano University School of Business in North Vancouver, noted in a Globe and Mail op-ed that binding arbitration “is increasingly the way Ottawa deals with labor disputes in key sectors: not by letting them play out, but by cutting them off.”
Since 2010, Canadian federal governments — both Liberal and Conservative — have ordered the end of labor disputes nine times, including postal workers in 2011, 2018, and 2024; railworkers in 2012 and 2024; dockworkers in 2021 and 2024; and airline workers at WestJet — Air Canada’s smaller Calgary-based competitor — earlier this year.
McFadyen describes this practice as “collective-bargaining theatre — a ritual in which everyone goes through the motions until the government swoops in with the deus ex machina of binding arbitration.”
“The irony is that binding arbitration doesn’t even resolve disputes,” he wrote. “It postpones them. It freezes resentment. Workers feel robbed. Employers learn the wrong lesson. Governments set another precedent. And the cycle repeats.”
CUPE’s Defiance
CUPE isn’t playing along with the government’s theatrics this time around, defying the CIRB’s order to end the strike by noon on August 18.
Before the CIRB issued its order, CUPE made it clear that it wouldn’t comply, noting that CIRB chair Maryse Tremblay worked as a lawyer for Air Canada from 1998 to 2004. That Tremblay wasn’t recused from a decision involving her former employer represents “a staggering conflict of interest,” said the union.
CUPE national president Mark Hancock said he was aware of the personal risks associated with defying the CIRB.
“We will not be returning to the skies this afternoon,” Hancock said at an August 18 news conference. “If it means folks like me going to jail, then so be it. If it means our union being fined, then so be it.”
CUPE’s defiance has a legal basis in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the freedom of association codified in Charter section 2(d) applies not only to collective bargaining but the ability to exercise that right through a strike.
Despite the federal government’s back-to-work order, CUPE held the line at pickets outside airports in Canada’s four biggest cities — Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and Calgary — as well as smaller picket lines in other major cities like Ottawa, Edmonton, and Winnipeg.
In Edmonton, where this writer resides, dozens gathered on the picket line on Monday afternoon. CUPE flight attendants were joined by some of their retired colleagues as well as members of the Air Line Pilots Association, the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees — the province’s largest union — the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, United Nurses of Alberta, and the Teamsters.
“It’s just been a creeping situation, where people are saying, ‘Enough is enough. No longer is our labor going to be free,’” said Sherry Hansen-Smith, a retired flight attendant and one-time vice president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, as picketers chanted So-so-so-solidarity.
Rail conductor and Teamsters shop steward Alan Christie took direct aim at the federal Liberals’ attempt to end the strike before it could have an impact. “As workers, our leverage at the bargaining table is withdrawing our labor, essentially. For a government to step in and take away that right for all workers in Canada is unconscionable,” he said. “It’s imperative that all workers stand up against this and I’m more than happy to come here and show my support in whatever way I can.”
Government Shows Cracks
Unions have won major gains via unauthorized strikes throughout Canadian history, with postal workers leading the way. In 1965, a wildcat strike by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) secured the right for public sector workers to form unions and strike — a right that was enshrined in legislation two years later.
In 1974, CUPW went on an unauthorized strike seeking pay equity for postal coders, who were almost entirely women. This action resulted in an arbitrator ordering that coders be paid the same as postal clerks, marking a significant achievement for gender pay equity.
By Monday afternoon, CUPE’s defiance appeared to be working. Minister Hajdu announced the immediate launch of an investigation into unpaid work in the airline industry, which she characterized as “unacceptable.”
“Nobody should work for free in this country, and in fact we expect to get paid for the work that we perform,” said Hajdu.
It’s unclear why the government, which has the ability to prohibit unpaid labor whenever it wants, needs to first launch an investigation into the practice — except as a means to buy labor peace without making firm commitments.
But the mere fact that the minister was speaking CUPE’s language after just a few hours of unauthorized picketing shows the power of a defiant, adversarial labor movement. With a deal now looking likely, Air Canada’s flight attendants have shown that standing firm — even in defiance of a federal order — can force both employers and government to reckon with long-ignored unfair labor practices.