Air Canada Strike

The flight attendants for Air Canada have come to an agreement. Knowing nothing about Canadian labor law, I watched this with fascination. The attendants had a very good reason to strike–they are forced to do work before and after their shifts without pay, which is completely unacceptable. They basically shut down flight in Canada. That led the government to intervene. At which point the attendants said they didn’t care what the government thought about it, they were going to keep striking. In American labor law, because of the Railway Labor Act that also controls airline labor relations, that would have been illegal, but Canada has different law, of course. We’ll see what the details are, but at least according to the attendants union, this was a constitutional crisis because from their perspective, the government didn’t have the right to force them back to work. Air Canada tried to frame this whole thing as about wages and they did offer big wage gains, but strikes are often more about dignity than the wages themselves. In January, I have an Air Canada flight from Singapore to Vancouver, which runs a mere 15 hours, so those attendants will be deserving every loonie they can get.

Anyway, there might be more to talk about here, so I may revisit it.