Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon met both the company and the union on Thursday. Both sides are still far apart on the question of wages.
MacKinnon has broad powers to tackle disputes and last month intervened within 24 hours to end a stoppage at the country’s two largest railway companies, Canadian Pacific Kansas City and Canadian National Railway.
Air Canada says this set a precedent. But while Ottawa has intervened several times in labor disputes over the last few decades, it has only done so after stoppages have begun, not before.
“We are not going to interfere, we are not going to take action before it really becomes very clear that there is no goodwill at the negotiating table,” said Trudeau.
The Business Council of Canada, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a joint statement on Friday calling on Ottawa to intervene to prevent a strike before it began.
This feels like a promise that they’ll step in as soon as its clear an actual strike will happen. All Air Canada has to do is refuse to compromise and the government will fix it for them.
The pilots have them by the balls though. Thanks to COVID schenanigans there is a demand in the US for pilots that are easily paid well above what Air Canada pilots get atm. Government steps in and pilots will migrate south en masse.
IMO Trudeau is putting pressure on AC to get this settled ASAP because they are all F’d if they dare play hardball.
Thank goodness for that. Finally something good came out of COVID. Fingers crossed, and here’s hoping that the pilots get the pay raises and etc that they clearly deserve, either way.
Another good thing that came out of covid: yours truly got laid off from retail/sales/customer service after ten years, giving him the first time off in ages to reflect on how long he’d been doing it and that he was still getting paid minimum wage. His time, experience and work was worthless. So he went back to college, worked hard on an IT degree and now a little under a year after graduation he’s got a great job in cybersecurity for municipal government.
It might not mean anything to you it its a big silver lining to having basically completely missed 3 years of my life thanks to covid. But yeah, fuck covid.
Happy to hear that things worked out for you in the end!
Knowing something in someone’s life worked out - that actually does have a lot of meaning for me.