A traveller walks past an Air Transat logo in departures at Montreal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport on Tuesday, the day the airline and pilots' union reached a tentative agreement.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
Barry Eidlin is an associate professor of sociology at McGill University.
On Tuesday night, just hours before 750 Air Transat pilots were set to go on strike, the negotiating team for their union announced a tentative agreement.
The pilots had been negotiating since January, and were working under a contract that had not been renegotiated in a decade. They had agreed three times to extensions of their 2015 agreement to help the company through crises, including an attempted takeover by Air Canada and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. But this year pilots said “no more.”
The pilots were seeking what they called a “modernized” agreement, with wages that reflect increases in the cost of living, as well as improved job security and health and safety protections. The strike would have paralyzed the leisure carrier’s operations worldwide.
Air Transat dispute reflects a wider push for wage equality
That threat is at least postponed for now while pilots vote on the proposed settlement. Details of the agreement are not yet public, but by voting for a strike mandate by 99 per cent, with 98-per-cent turnout, the pilots have made clear that they are unwilling to settle short. It is premature to say that the contract is settled.
Still, the process that led to the Air Transat deal serves as a useful illustration of how collective bargaining is supposed to work.
The fact that Air Transat was facing its first strike in its 38-year history speaks to the charged collective bargaining environment of the past three years. Workers across Canada have gone on strike at levels not seen in decades in an effort to make up for lost ground after decades of stagnant wages, eroding job security and shrinking benefits. This has particularly been the case in the transportation and logistics sectors, with high-profile strikes in rail, at the ports and Canada Post, and of course at Air Canada and WestJet.
The big difference between those strikes and the current dispute at Air Transat is the notable lack of calls for government intervention. Patty Hajdu, who occupies the position formerly known as Labour Minister, was “monitoring the situation closely.” But she pointedly did not mention any plans to invoke Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code to order pilots back to work, as she did with Air Canada flight attendants in August, and as previous labour ministers have done repeatedly in recent years.
The difference is instructive. In the absence of threats of government intervention, the pilots’ strike notice worked as intended. It created the pressure on the employer that is often necessary to push through and reach a deal.
It is a stark difference to what happened at Air Canada, where management walked away from the table once flight attendants gave their 72-hour strike notice. In that case, Ms. Hajdu barely waited a few hours before invoking Section 107, but flight attendants threw her a curveball by defying the back-to-work order. Afterwards, Air Canada chief executive Michael Rousseau said about the union, “Well, we thought, obviously, that Section 107 would be enforced, and that they wouldn’t illegally avoid Section 107.”
Mr. Rousseau’s comment powerfully illustrates the corrosive effect that repeated government intervention has had on negotiations across the country, and not just in the airline industry. Secure in the knowledge that government intervention will restrain workers’ ability to strike, employers have dragged their feet at the bargaining table, leaving major workplace issues unresolved and ensuring further labour conflict down the road.
Unions in a bind as governments increasingly use arcane pieces of the law to quash strikes
For collective bargaining to work, the parties need some leverage over each other to make the cost of walking away from the table greater than that of reaching an agreement. In labour-management relations, employers have many tools at their disposal to exert leverage. Workers have one: the power to withdraw their labour. Undermining that power doesn’t just skew the playing field in management’s favour. It erodes the foundation of the collective bargaining regime.
In recent decades, Canadian federal and provincial governments have distinguished themselves from other G7 countries by frequently resorting to back-to-work orders to regulate labour disputes. Nobody else comes close. The result has been a series of drawn-out negotiations punctuated by repeated strikes in certain industries, notably the ports.
But the Air Transat conflict shows what happens when federal intervention is off the table. Employers sit down to negotiate. Granted, bargaining did come down to the wire. But with more than a decade of workplace issues left to resolve this bargaining round, it is understandable that negotiations would be tougher than usual.
Air Transat management complained loudly that the pilots’ strike notice was premature, but sometimes, only the high-pressure environment of a hard strike deadline can create the conditions for a breakthrough at the bargaining table.