Flight Attendants Decisively Reject Air Canada’s Offer
In a stunning show of determination, the flight attendants of Air Canada voted by 99.1 percent to reject the wage offer. The turnout was 94.6 percent. Virtually all the CUPE members voted no. This is a testament to the workers’ grassroots organizing and iron will.
The flight attendants, overwhelmingly women workers, have now twice stood up to the Air Canada bosses and their friends in the government. The boss of Air Canada, Michael Rousseau, never negotiated seriously, instead relying on the government to interfere, using Section 107 of the Labour Code to stop the strike. He stated that “we thought the Section 107 would be enforced.”
After only a few hours of the flight attendants’ strike, the Liberal minister, Patty Hajdu, did what the bosses wanted. Except the flight attendants stayed on strike. This demonstrated to all the Labour movement how to stand up for union rights. Section 107 is now widely discredited.
Low pay
After three days of the strike a tentative agreement was announced, but it failed to fully pay for groundwork or address the low wages of many attendants. The rejected offer would still have some flight attendants earning less than the federal minimum wage of $17.75 an hour, which would be $2,840 a month for a 40-hour week. Now the 10,000 workers have clearly stated they want a living wage.
Most flight attendants can only work 75 to 80 hours a month because of lay-over time, required rest between flights and the long unpaid hours. Some workers are so low paid the union set up food banks.
The rejected offer only provided limited payment for groundwork — the time the crews work before takeoff and after landing. An example of the attendants’ vital, but unpaid, role was the recent evacuation of an Air Canada flight. On Sunday, August 31, flight attendants safely evacuated 117 passengers from an Air Canada flight at Denver Airport, after the plane made an emergency landing.
Questions about leadership’s strategy
The flight attendants’ vote was only on the pay part of the new agreement rather than on the full contract. The union leadership put what they should have known was an unsatisfactory agreement (99.1 percent said no!) to the members, rather than stay on strike longer to force Air Canada to come up with a better offer. Now, after the decisive rejection, the dispute goes to negotiations with a mediator and if there is no agreement, to binding arbitration. Why did the leadership agree to this rather than using the flight attendants’ economic power through shutting down Air Canada?
Air Canada cannot fly any passenger planes without flight attendants, and if the government acted on behalf of the employer the full strength of the labour movement could shut down the entire airline industry. The courts cannot make airplanes fly!
Socialist Alternative wrote in the last article on the dispute “The union did not win its full demands and might have won more if the strike had continued longer. It would have been better to continue the strike until the members had time to see and vote on the agreement.”
Unless Air Canada wants years of discontent on its fights it will now have to seriously increase the wages.
The flight attendants, by defying section 107 and with this vote, have won two victories for themselves and all workers.
