The successful challenge of a piece of the Canadian Labor Code has promoted the hope of workers’ rights in the country, labor defenders say.
The union and its thousands of stunned Air Canada hostesses refused to work again after the Federal Government invoked section 107 of the Canada Labor Code.
As a result, Air Canada returned to the negotiation table and during the night, the two parties reached an tentative agreement that the 10,500 hostesses in the union will soon be able to vote.
“This is a great victory for hostesses that will force the Federal Government to reassess how they intervene in labor disputes in the future,” said Larry Savage, professor of labor studies at the University of Brock.
“The order to return to the work of the spectacularly back cover ministers.”
CBC learned that the first year of the agreement would give a 12 percent salary increase to flight attendees in their first five years at work and eight percent for those with six or more years of experience. In the second year, employees would see another increase of three percent, followed by an increase of 2.5 percent per later year.
One of the biggest problems, which galvanized public sympathy, was the fact that flight attendees in Air Canada and other airlines are not paid most of the time they spend helping passengers while they are on the ground.
According to the new agreement, attendees would receive 50 percent of their salary for 60 minutes of searches of shipping and cabin for narrow body airplanes and 70 minutes for wide airplanes of the body. That amount would increase by five percent each year of the agreement.
Union says that Air Canada expected government intervention
The agreement took approximately seven hours, but followed eight months of negotiation, says Mark Hancock, national president of public employees of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE).
Hancock said that it had recently been clear that Air Canada expected the federal government to force flight attendees to work without reaching a collective agreement, as had the past autumn with postal workers.
“We definitely notice a change in the employer,” said Hancock in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “We were thinking that, well, they will probably bring 107.”
Only 12 hours from the strike that began on Saturday, the Minister of Jobs, Patty Hajdu, invoked section 107, which allows the minister to order binding arbitration and finish the labor stops.
The arrangement had rarely used until 2024, when the liberals invoked it in port attacks and railways, then again during the Canada Post strike.
Jobs Minister Patty Hajdu, said she has invoked section 107 of the Canada Labor Code to order binding arbitration between the airline and its union and has ordered that the operations resume. Air Canada previously requested Hajdu to intervene with a binding arbitration order, which is one of the powers granted to the minister through section 107 of the Code.
When the weekend was invoked again, labor rights activists began to worry that the government’s agency in this action, instead of approved consecutive legislation in Parliament, would undermine both collective bargaining and the general law of workers to attack in this country.
“It is actually corrosive for the practice itself and the principle of free voluntary collective bargaining,” said Chris Roberts, director of Social and Economic Policy of the Canadian Labor Congress (CLC).
But this time, something different happened.
Hancock announced that surprising flight attendees would remain in the picket line despite the order of return to the work of the Labor Board of Canada, which was triggered by the invocation of Hajdu in section 107.
“If that means that people like me go to jail, so it is,” said Hancock in comments that came to the headlines throughout the country.
“Our members were ready for the long journey,” he added on Tuesday,
Roberts said he also knew that Air Canada was stagnating during the conversations and that “he had focused his attention on urging the government to activate 107”.
The president of the Labor Congress, Bea Bruske, said he believes that employers will no longer be able to expect this type of intervention.
“Employers should never think that the government can rescue them,” he said.
The issue of unpaid work resonated
As the threat of a strike or blockade approached, Cupe realized that its members had the support of the public, said Savage, the professor at the University of Brock whose research has focused on the policy of the work organized in Canada.
“There was something in these hostesses, the particular problem on which they struggled related to unpaid work, [that] He resonated with so many, “Savage said.
Between that and the speed with which Hajdu invoked section 107, Air Canada hastened to return to the table, he said.
There have been the efforts of other recent governments to intervene in labor disputes or limit the right of workers to the strike. In Ontario, the introduction of 2022 of Prime Minister Doug Ford, then the repeal, of bill 28 followed a protest for several different unions; In other places, Quebec’s bill 89 is being challenged by four faculty associations of the McGill University.
In each case, Savage says that there has been a public rejection of the attempts of Canadian governments to exceed labor rights.
“When governments stack the cover in favor of employers, unions will resist. Workers will use their influence to insist on negotiated agreements, even if that means ignoring the law,” he said.
