Duncan Dee is a former chief operating officer at Air Canada.
Over the past year and a half, air travellers and shippers have experienced no fewer than three separate threats of labour disruption at Canada’s largest airlines and one full-blown airline strike. Add to that last month’s railway lockouts, and the picture for interprovincial transportation has been particularly grim.
For a trade-dependent country as big as Canada, even the threat of disruption in the transportation system has significant consequences. From ruined vacations to the inability to ship fresh seafood to market, the preparations needed in anticipation of a transportation network disruption can be almost as consequential as a full-blown shutdown itself. Unlike in Western Europe, where high-speed passenger rail offers a viable alternative to short- and medium-haul air transportation, such alternatives simply do not exist in Canada.
Given what Canadians have experienced, it would be inappropriate to point fingers solely at the parties directly involved. Different employers. Different unions. Different industries. Different demands. Yet, the same chaos, uncertainty and disruption.
Labour relations in Canada is a one-size-fits-all process. Federal rules governing how employers and unions bargain are the same for the public service as they are for any other federally regulated sector, including transportation. While striking federal public servants can cause major inconveniences, as Canadians experienced during the 12-day national strike by the Public Service Alliance of Canada last year, such strikes do not tend to cause the country to grind to a halt. Borders and other critical infrastructure continued to function. Trade continued to flow. The lives of most Canadians hardly missed a beat. Sure, passport applications were delayed, but even the processing of Canada Pension Plan payments continued.
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The same cannot be said for strikes affecting interprovincial transportation. As Canadians saw with the railway lockouts and the strike by WestJet’s mechanics, even a short strike shutting down the railways or grounding flights can have a detrimental impact on the entire economy. Beyond missed vacations, grounding one of Canada’s national airlines can literally leave entire regions of this vast country isolated with few realistic alternatives available.
There has got to be a better way.
While labour relations in most sectors in the United States fall under the National Labor Relations Act, airlines and railways are treated differently. In 1926, the United States Congress recognized the important role that railways play in interstate commerce. Members of Congress understood that a disruption in the national transportation system could have an impact on the entire U.S. economy. In response, Congress passed the Railway Labor Act (RLA), providing special rules of conduct for governing labour relations around the country’s railways. A decade later, with the advent of commercial aviation, the Act was expanded to include labour disputes at American airlines.
According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, “the purposes of the RLA are to avoid any interruption of interstate commerce by providing for the prompt disposition of disputes,” and to protect “the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively.”
In order to do so, the RLA provides for elaborate rules and procedures to ensure that both employers and unions bargain in good faith. It imposes an obligation on both employers and unions to make and maintain collective agreements. In the absence of a negotiated agreement, mandatory dispute resolution, voluntary arbitration, and cooling-off periods follow. Ultimately, even action by the President is contemplated through the creation of a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB), which has the power to make non-binding recommendations. The PEB’s recommendations tend to form the basis of further Congressional action to prevent disruption if required.
In short, Congress designed an elaborate, multistage process with clear rules of engagement designed to make strikes and lockouts the options of last resort to resolve labour disputes.
While such rules may strike fear in the hearts of Canada’s labour movement, the results speak for themselves. Airline and railway strikes in the United States are extremely rare. The last U.S. national airline strike took place in 2010 at Spirit Airlines, and, as Air Canada’s pilots themselves have asserted, U.S. airline pilots today enjoy the highest wages in the world.
Given Canada’s geography, the lack of viable alternatives and the economy’s dependence on a functioning transportation system, Parliament should consider whether a Canadian version of the RLA is appropriate. With several more employee groups set to renegotiate their collective agreements over the coming months at Air Canada alone, Canada’s beleaguered air travellers and shippers deserve real stability.