The Canadian government finally took action to resolve the railroad labor crisis on Friday, ordering Canadian National Railway (CN), Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC), and the Teamsters union to accept mediation by a third party.
Even as a faint glimmer of light appeared at the end of the railroad tunnel, Air Canada’s pilots voted overwhelmingly to authorize their own strike.
Canada’s railroad drama, a confluence of bad timing and seemingly intractable demands by all parties, triggered a shutdown of railroad freight on Thursday. Both Canadian and American business groups pleaded with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to take action, as consumers in both countries stood to suffer billions of dollars in damage, particularly in the food and agriculture sector.
Trudeau has been under enormous pressure from the left wing of his political coalition to stay out of the dispute because the left saw mediation of the dispute as inevitably favoring the railroad companies over labor.
On Friday, Labor Minister Stephen MacKinnon ordered the union and rail companies to accept binding arbitration from a third-party mediator, namely the Canada Industrial Relations Board.
“These collective bargaining negotiations belong to these parties, but their effects and the impacts of the current impasse are being borne by all Canadians. And there is an impasse,” MacKinnon said.
“It is the government’s responsibility to ensure industrial peace in this critically vital sector. Thus we will be examining why we experienced repeated conflicts in the railway sector and the conditions that led to the parallel work stoppages we are seeing,” he said.
MacKinnon insisted the Trudeau administration is still “committed totally to collective bargaining” and wants to give it “every possible opportunity to succeed,” but the government felt the consequences of a railroad shutdown were simply too dire to allow it to continue indefinitely.
The labor minister said he expected the arbitration process to deliver results within a matter of days. Meanwhile, he required the railroads to begin resuming services, and told union employees to return to work under emergency extensions of their existing contracts.
CN said it effectively lifted its lockout a matter of hours after it began on Thursday, in order to “expedite the recovery of the economy.”
CPKC, on the other hand, said that while it would like to resume railroad operations, the unions remain intransigent and may file a legal challenge against MacKinnon’s arbitration order.
The Teamsters insisted the “main obstacles to reaching an agreement remain the companies’ demands, not union proposals,” and on Friday they issued a 72-hour strike notice against CN. Meanwhile, the union representing about 3,300 CPKC employees did indeed announce they would file a legal challenge against the arbitration order.
“We are focused on getting back to work. The Teamsters are focused on getting back to the picket line,” CN spokesman Jonathan Abecassis said on Friday.
Writing at the Globe and Mail on Wednesday, columnist Bruce Curran dished out blame to everyone involved in the railroad calamity – “putatively greedy railway companies, allegedly lazy and demanding workers, and supposedly intransigent unions” – but argued that an arbitration order was unlikely to resolve the situation because the union right to collective bargaining will probably trump the government’s interest in getting trains moving under Canadian law.
Instead, Curran advised the Trudeau administration to quickly implement a “robust set of safety rules covering all railway workers in safety-sensitive positions,” essentially ceding the key issue of work schedule flexibility to the unions by fiat.
Curran speculated that taking this issue off the table would spur the rail companies and unions to resolve other issues quickly, although the current strategy of legal challenges and strike notices pursued by the unions would seem to call that hypothesis into question.
Meanwhile, Air Canada’s pilots voted 98 percent in favor of authorizing their own strike on Thursday. Such a strike could not be called immediately as collective bargaining rules stipulate a 21-day “cooling-off period” after the current reconciliation interval ends on Monday. This should hopefully give Canada enough time to resolve its railroad crisis before it has a comparable shutdown in the sky.
As with the railroad companies and unions, Air Canada pilots have been negotiating for about a year to secure a new contract. Their old contract ran from 2013 to 2023, during which time the union says Canadian pilot salaries fell too far behind their American counterparts.
Charlene Hudy, head of the Air Canada division of the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), told the Financial Post on Thursday that America’s four biggest airlines have signed new contracts with their pilots over the past 18 months, and some of their flight crews are now earning double what Air Canada crews make.
“We all fly passengers under the Star Alliance. So we’re flying the same passengers in the same airspace on some of the very same routes, and those pilots are being compensated dramatically more than us,” Hudy said.
The Star Alliance is an international aviation association that includes major airlines from the United States, Canada, and several other nations, plus a host of smaller regional airlines.
Hudy argued that the just-expired ten-year contract was negotiated just after Air Canada emerged from bankruptcy, so the compensation rates for air crews were abnormally low.
“Our goal is to avoid a strike and our focus remains on modernizing our contract for Air Canada pilots,” she said.
Air Canada executives sounded hopeful that a strike could be avoided, as the company has reached agreement with its employee union on some key points. The company issued a statement on Thursday describing the pilots’ vote to authorize a strike as a “normal step in the negotiation process.”
“Air Canada remains committed to the bargaining process and will continue to work towards a fair and equitable collective agreement with ALPA that recognizes the contributions of our pilots and supports the competitiveness and long-term growth of our company,” the company said.
Global News nevertheless reported that pilots will launch a nationwide “informational picket” on Tuesday, with demonstrations at the international airports in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Winnipeg. The pilots will not actually be on strike during these demonstrations, so normal flight operations are expected to continue.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.