Air Canada – do you want it, or do you want to live?

My local CBC radio station led this morning with: “Air Canada: do we need it?”

I guess that’s a rhetorical question, like, “use of your left hand; do you care?”

As usual, the Harperites are stepping in to attempt to back up merit-deprived CEOs against the people who put Jaguars in their driveways.  For the Tories, it’s a zero-sum game; labour consequences could ensue for years, but if the ultimate horizon is getting rid of unions and collective bargaining, period, and putting Jaguars _and_ Bentleys in the driveways, then that’s an anthill in the history of humanity worth dying on.

As usual, the popular media (the only kind we have in Canada, that represents maybe 30% of the people, but those 30% are the ones who keep them in jobs) has been playing up airline labour strife, attempting to whip the public up into a frenzy of airline-staff hating mad people.  To what end?  I shall come back to this. 

On every news show, we get frustrated travelers saying, “oh, I can’t believe this.”  Yeah, sure you can’t, until your employer comes to you and says, “look, I want you to keep doing the same job you’ve always done, but better, for a lot less money and security.”  Ok all you free agents, you just go with it.  Maybe next time you’re drilling a well, I’ll kinda like just, sidle up to you and say, “oh, and, by the way, I’m giving you $65, not $85/hr today, tomorrow you’re starting at 3 a.m., not 6, and my girlfriend just borrowed your pickup.”  By attempting to destroy incentive and initiative, and create employees who don’t care at all about their pointless jobs, the Harperites with their unmatchable pensions are effectively ensuring a lack of public safety _and_ poor people who can never complain about Harper pensions.

Travel.  Travel has always been contingent, throughout all recorded history.  No-one ever had a right or a privilege to just pick up and go anywhere on the planet anytime; that never was and isn’t now the case.  There are other factors.  Weather, wars (an ancient place like Baghdad is now off-limits to me; it wasn’t to me when I was younger, but now it probably is for my whole life, because of the people I share the continent with), technology, politics, infirmity—virtually anything can and always has limited travel.

So how about those greedy “unionized” airline staff?  Well, let’s take easily the most visible of all airline staff to us, flight attendants.  If you worked for Air Canada for 25 years, if you were amongst its very most senior and experienced flight attendants, you, yes you, could be eligible for a princely salary of about 45k C.  You’ve got lots of training, you speak 2 or more languages, you have a gruelling and variable schedule, and, after a quarter of a century, you too can make about 45k.  In other words, maybe a third or a quarter at best of Lisa Raitt’s pension when she’s not even working or doing anything.  With that wage, you couldn’t even rent an apartment in a city like Vancouver, and you couldn’t even hope to buy so much as a lean-to on the Canadian Shield.  But oh, yes, all those aggrieved travelers think that *they’re* the only people who work, not you.  It must take skill _and_ determination not to spill coffee in people’s laps.

Or take “Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot who, with experience (experience, anyone?) and nerves of steel, landed a plane on the Hudson river (on a river!!!) and saved everyone on board from what had almost certainly been complete disaster—he went before Congress and noted how his pay had been cut 40% and how the greatest aid to public safety was a trained pilot.  Now take the pilots of the recent Buffalo crash, which killed 50 and all on board (http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2009/05/13/buffalo-crash-probe051309.html); the co-pilot was sleep-deprived out of her mind trying to make it to her awesome 16k p/a gig.  The news reports mostly focused on important people on the plane who died, but if they cared why it happened, they might look at desperate, highly educated professionals who couldn’t eat unless they did things most people wouldn’t even try with a paring knife in their own kitchens.

Meantime, over at Air Canada, in the depths of a worldwide recession, CEO Calin Rovinescu picked up a 75% wage increase in 2010, to 4.6 million.  On his salary alone, he probably could have paid enough for pretty well every citizen of Regina to be a pilot like those who crashed a plane in Buffalo.

But ah yes, those greedy unionized workers.  Never “sexy” enough for Lisa Raitt.  (Why has no-one ever asked Lisa Raitt what she thinks a “sexy” issue is?) 

I remember once when I was in Italy and there was a threat of a train strike.  Still, I got on the train.  It was my first time in Italy, it was late on a hot night in the summer, I was alone and I had a definite itinerary and nowhere else to go, not speaking the language, really, and not knowing anyone.  Locals, or habitués, seemed to take the matter a bit in stride.  I sat in a foetid compartment in the wee hours.  I did walk down the corridor and see Italian train employees in natty blue uniforms coolly playing cards in a first-class compartment.  In my compartment was a sweet, ample young (older than me) couple from America, heavily perspiring.  They thought the world was ending, and they were seeing it.  The tide of the red scourge was upon them, enveloping them completely.  Their despair and hopelessness left them utterly without resources or cognitive abilities.  They knew the end was nigh—people, not working, so that they could negotiate—unthinkable!!—and so they hoofed their heavy gear (they were American—and we all know how much Americans have to teach Italians about debt) off the train and sat for a bit, motionless, in the still humid night on the dark platform.  Through the open windows of the motionless carriage, I exchanged a few words with them.  They thought the world, and they, were really quite helpless before a nameless, godless, all-enveloping communism—they’d learned about it in Virginia, and yes, Virginia, they were seeing it, firsthand.  They knew they had to wander off, somewhere, though where they and their god would have to decide later.  And no sooner had they heaved their heavy gear onto their backs and started to trundle away, dismally, into the moist darkness, then there was a k-chunka, chunka, and the train started to roll.  And I got where I was going, to the northern tip of Denmark, all on time.  I was naturally very worried about being stuck in a place where I had no money or friends or ways of communicating, but I had a sense that cooler heads could prevail.  When I think of this micro-second in my life, I’m reminded of Michael Moore’s _Sicko_ movie, wherein he meets with a group of American ex-pats in a restaurant in France, and one of the women points out that, in Europe, people don’t fear their leaders.  People in Europe have high expectations of their leaders; they don’t just want to have beers with them, and they don’t fear that their leaders, birthing a nation, will come after them as coneheads. They don’t want to go hunting with them, and they don’t fear getting hunted by them; they have a rule of law for that, one not subject to the whims of activist leaders. A perception—an expectation--of a relationship of respect and trust exists.

Now let’s come back to Harper.  His government, rather than governing, runs attack ads, and, rather than facilitating business-labour relations to promote a strong economy, eagerly takes the business side in an effort to cow and destroy labour.  In their ideologically driven minds, this makes sense to the Harperites.  Sure, they belong to a party that interned honourable citizens during wars, tried to prevent women from voting, eagerly followed Republican precedents (that earnestly or violently supported slavery) and on and on.  Being on the wrong side of development, progress, knowledge, education, science, and history and so on just doesn’t bother the Harperites, because they have massive personal gains to make from catering to those who like to sleep through veterans’ meetings, like Rob Anders.  There is huge cash to be made.  So that Stephen Harper can sit, anaesthetized on gin and tonics on a cottage-country dock somewhere when he’s 70, gazing dully at the too-bright water and reflecting, between naps, on all the great things he did.

It’s a public safety issue.  If Air Canada can pay its CEO, per year, more than 10 000 times what it pays its most experienced cabin crew, then I, as someone who flies, have safety concerns.  Something is seriously, seriously, structurally wrong with this company, and anyone who values their safety should be concerned. That the government should be jeopardizing public safety with knee-jerk support for millionaire CEOs over collective bargaining should be a concern to every Canadian.

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