Air Canada’s dirty little secret of structuring massive amounts of wage theft for their flight attendants is finally out in the public.
For years, flight attendants have been working for free – 35 hours a month on average. They only get paid from when the plane lifts off until it lands. So, all that work – checking us in, getting us comfortable in our seats, assisting young families and our elderly, stowing away baggage, reviewing safety guidelines, waiting on the tarmac for the go ahead to fly – all of it is unpaid. Now that airline attendants are fighting to actually get paid for all of their work hours, what is the government’s response? To deny their right to strike and leave it to arbitrators who will keep the status quo.
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It seems shocking that this has been allowed to go on for years. But for those of us working with non-unionized workers, we know that wage theft has become normalized in so many sectors. And the provincial and federal governments are totally complicit in these violations.
In fact, the Ontario government’s new Digital Platform Workers’ Rights Act exempts food delivery and ride hail drivers from our right under the Employment Standards Act to be paid at least minimum wage for every hour worked. How does it do this? The new law says digital platform workers must be paid at least minimum wage but only for “active hours.” So, gig workers don’t get paid for the 40% of their working time when they are required to wait for delivery assignments and return to central locations. Sound familiar?
Just imagine if you are a service worker and are only paid when you are helping a customer, or serving someone a coffee for a meal. What if you are a bank teller and there are no customers in the bank or no one phoning you as a customer service agent? All those times waiting – not paid.
Over the past three decades, there has been an insidious increase in wage theft in every sector as corporations, aided by government inaction, impose more of the costs of business onto individual workers. We have seen an explosive growth in independent contract work where suddenly truck drivers, personal support workers, sales people and cleaners are NOT treated as employees and entitled to basic employment standard protections. They are now responsible for their gas money, insurance, equipment to do the work, their vehicle maintenance, and are not paid when their clients cancel the work or not paid when they are waiting for a shipment.
At the Workers’ Action Centre, we routinely deal with workers not paid for training time, having to supply the tools for work, not paid for all hours of work and, many times, just not getting paid at all. The government’s failure to enforce basic labour laws has bolstered corporate confidence to shift the risks and responsibilities of running their businesses onto workers. It is the government’s refusal to hold employers responsible for misclassifying workers as independent contractors – and allowing huge multi-national companies like Uber to get away with removing employee status from thousands of workers – that supports business models built on wage theft.
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There are some simple solutions that we have been pushing for over the last 15 years, as the government puts its head in the sand and sides with corporate greed. Workers are sick and tired of having to fight for our basic rights. It’s inspiring to see Air Canada Flight Attendants speak truth to power and issue a message all workers can understand – don’t get paid, we won’t fly.
Imagine if all of us stopped working when we were not getting paid. Governments and corporations, pay heed to this: We are not going to put up with wage theft anymore!