Travel season is fast approaching, and with that, millions of Canadians will flock to airports across the country and make their way to see loved ones and spend time together for the holidays.
All the while, flight attendants will be there to make sure your trip is safe and smooth.
But did you know that those flight attendants you are relying on are working without being paid?
Flight attendants in Canada — 80 per cent of whom are women — work an average of 35 hours per month unpaid.
In the airline industry, most flight attendants don’t start getting paid until the wheels push back, and they stop being paid once the flight arrives at the gate.
This means they aren’t compensated for the essential duties of boarding, assisting passengers of all ages, conducting safety checks and managing deplaning.
In any other industry, it would be unthinkable for an employer to not pay their employees for work performed on-site and in uniform.
But in Canada’s airline sector, that’s just business as usual.
This reality is a combination of outdated pay structures, longstanding industry practices and gaps in the federal labour code. Current industry standards were set decades ago but flying has changed a lot since then. Flight attendants’ wages have been flat lining for decades, and increasingly congested airports and severe weather events mean even more unpaid hours because flight attendants aren’t paid during many delays either.
Despite working gruelling 14 hour days or longer, many flight attendants are sometimes only paid for half their time on the job. All of this is happening during a cost-of-living crisis that is seeing more and more flight attendants living out of their cars.
The situation is so dire, some flight attendant unions have been forced to open food banks in their offices for their members.
Of course, this current model works just fine for Canada’s billion-dollar airlines. Air Canada, for example, has been blowing past its internal profit targets, posting $1.5 billion in profits in its last quarterly earnings report alone and Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau took home more than $12 million in 2023.
There’s no sidestepping the fact that gender has played a role in this exploitation of Canada’s flight attendants.
Even as the workforce becomes more diverse, longstanding gender biases have normalized the unfair and exploitive compensation model. Just like other professions dominated by women, like nursing and childcare, their work is undervalued and underpaid.
It is time for that bias to be corrected and for Ottawa to close the loopholes in the Canada Labour Code that have allowed airlines to exploit flight attendants for decades.
Thanks to an NDP bill recently tabled in Parliament, that time may be coming soon.
Bill C-415, the Flight Attendant Remuneration Act, will enshrine the end of unpaid work in the airline sector into law, by requiring airlines to pay their employees their full rate of pay for every hour they work.
Yes, it is unthinkable that such a law would even be necessary in Canada in 2024. But this shady industry practice has thrived in the darkness for decades under Liberals and Conservatives. It’s time for that to end.
Whether you’re a nurse, an electrician or a barista, when you show up at work, in uniform, and begin your duties, you’re getting paid. Why should flight attendants — the people who are responsible for keeping the public safe at 30,000 feet in the air — be any different?
Flight attendants have been sounding this alarm for over a year now, with their Unpaid Work Won’t Fly campaign. They deserve our support, including the support of the federal government.
Let’s make this travel season the season of fairness and ensure that those who work so hard to get us safely to our destinations are finally given the respect, and the pay, that they deserve.
– Port Moody–Coquitlam MP Bonita Zarrillo and Wesley Lesosky, president, airline division of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE)