Dear Editor:
I would just like to congratulate the leadership and the members of the union representing Air Canada flight attendants, the Canadian Union of Public Employees.
I was pleased to see the unwavering resolve demonstrated and the solidarity of fellow labour organizations. Because of their faith that what they were fighting for was fair and right, they were able to win satisfactory concessions from the airline, and I applaud them for that.
In a recent interview on BNN Bloomberg, the CEO of Air Canada admitted that their strategy was expecting that the mediating Canada Industrial Relations Board, which is currently administered by a former corporate legal counselor for Air Canada (talk about conflict of interest!) and the Canadian Minister of Jobs and Families Patty Hadju, would enforce broadly interpretable laws to rule that the union’s strike action was illegally disruptive, and that the flight attendants would go back to work at the terms of their pre-bargaining contracts.
Specifically, there’s a clause in the Canada Labour Code, Section 107, that says the minister has the power to personally direct the decisions of the CIRB. So even if the CIRB had ruled in favour of the flight attendants’ union and forced Air Canada to pay their workers fairly, the minister can reverse that ruling. That sounds pretty unfair to me. If the interests of the government mediator are controlled or influenced by the values of members of the management class of major employers, and there’s also a kill-switch that the minister can use, then can they ever be fair and impartial to the arguments of the working class?
This didn’t need to become such an embarrassment for Air Canada and the federal government. And now there’s a new negotiating strategy for unions who had de-escalated their strike threats when CIRB or the minister had ordered them to do so.
I hope to see more improvement to the lives of my fellow working Canadians. Whether members of a union or not, we all deserve dignity.
Dylan Clarke,
Elora