Air Canada strike focuses on flight attendants’ unpaid work

The battle between Air Canada and its flight attendants – which has boiled over into an illegal strike, stranding travellers and grounding planes – includes a fight over unpaid work that could set a precedent for other major carriers in Canada and around the world, experts say.

A key demand of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), which represents 10,400 flight attendants with Air Canada and its subsidiary Air Canada Rouge, is compensation for what is called “ground time.”

The aim is to end the widespread and long-standing practice of paying flight attendants primarily based on the time they are in the air, leaving them uncompensated during increasingly frequent and lengthy flight delays.

On Monday afternoon, federal Jobs Minister Patty Hajdu said on social media she is launching a probe into unpaid work in the airline sector, hours after the union vowed to continue to defy a Canada Industrial Relations Board ruling she sought ordering an end to the work stoppage.

Steven Tufts, a professor at York University specializing in the geography of organized labour, said the traditional pay structure has long been embedded in the industry, with its historically mostly female work force. But it is now being targeted by a global movement among trade unions.

And a win for the union at Air Canada, he said, could prompt other carriers in this country to follow suit, such as WestJet and Air Transat, where flight attendants are also represented by CUPE.

The system has long insulated airlines from costly wage bills resulting from flight delays, he said. But hours spent idle on the ground have become much more common since the COVID-19 pandemic.

And in 2022, he said, non-union carrier Delta Air Lines became the first major U.S. airline to offer its flight attendants limited, partial compensation for ground time. Delta now pays attendants half their hourly rate for 40 to 50 minutes of boarding time.

“It’s an anomaly. No other industry would treat workers that way,” Prof. Tufts said. “They got away with it for a number of years until people realized how unfair it was ... especially coming out of the pandemic, when flight attendants were sitting on the tarmac for five hours for a two-hour flight.”

Prof. Tufts also said CUPE and Air Canada had already agreed in principle to new compensation for ground time before the current conflict came to a head – but how much pay remains to be negotiated. He also said CUPE’s opposition to Ottawa’s move to send this dispute to an arbitrator is owing to concerns that arbitrators are more likely to tweak existing contracts than order transformative changes.

The union has said its flight attendants work an average of 35 hours a month for free, almost a week’s worth of pay – a tally that leaves the most junior flight attendants making the equivalent of less than minimum wage.

But in a document on its website, Air Canada says its treatment of ground time was endorsed by the union in previous contracts and is consistent with the practices of most global carriers.

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The airline also says that while attendants are paid for a “duty period” that begins one hour before departures and ends 15 minutes after arrivals, the previous contract allows for “additional compensation” if flight attendants are required to be on duty outside these times. The airline also says a flight attendant with 10 years of service makes $63.07 an hour, up more than 150 per cent from the starting $25.13 wage paid in 2015.

Half of Air Canada mainline flight attendants made $54,000 or less last year, a figure the company said reflects the fact that about one-third were hired in the past five years. At 10 years of service, flight attendants can make more than $70,000.

In response to complaints by flight attendants last year, both the federal NDP and Conservatives introduced bills that would have curtailed this unpaid work. Porter Airlines also started compensating its flight attendants for portions of their predeparture work this year.

University of Ottawa labour economics professor David Gray said while he agrees junior flight attendants deserve much better pay, the battle over ground time is “all semantics.”

For example, workers might end up having to accept smaller-than-demanded boosts in hourly pay rates, or fewer guaranteed hours, to win an end to unpaid time. He said both sides needed to be flexible in redesigning the pay structure.

“You can think of it as a contraption, as a machine with about five or six different levers, and they ought to be able to find a way out of it,” Prof. Gray said.

He also said he supported resolving this kind of dispute before an arbitrator, to avoid large strikes that paralyze key players in Canada’s transportation network: “The Canadian economy, we can’t afford this.”