EDITORIAL
Air Canada Strike:
Unpaid Work Won’t Fly

Aug 18, 2025

More than ten thousand Air Canada flight attendants went on strike at 1 a.m., August 16. They forced the company to cancel about 700 flights that day, carrying about 130,000 people.

Less than 12 hours later, the Canadian government ordered them back to work and imposed binding arbitration.

It’s not clear yet that the government’s order will work: this kind of move is not normal in Canada, and its legality is unsure. More importantly, it’s not a foregone conclusion that the flight attendants will go along with it. Hundreds of strikers could be heard chanting “we won’t stop” outside the Toronto airport after the order was issued.

Whenever the flight attendants finally go back to work, the airline admitted it will take a week or more to get back to normal. So, these few thousand workers, mostly women, have shown their power!

It’s been more than 10 years since their last contract. During that time, prices went way up, in Canada as well as the U.S. Flight attendant wages fell so far behind that their union reported many struggles to pay rent and buy basic groceries.

On top of that, flight attendants are only paid when the planes are moving. But flight attendants have to be on the plane well before it takes off, getting passengers on and off safely, restocking, setting up the cabin—during a delay, ground time can last hours. In addition to a long-overdue raise, the workers demand to be paid for all these hours of ground work. This is the kind of big change in a contract that an arbitrator is very unlikely to grant—one reason the attendants were so determined to strike.

Air Canada says that most airlines around the world only pay flight attendants when planes are in the air. But that just makes the Air Canada flight attendants’ fight all the more important!

Many workers do unpaid labor. Increasing numbers of bosses force people to work through their breaks. Others make workers stay and clean up after their shifts are over. Many require people to be at their work station ready to go when their shift starts—meaning the time to walk through the workplace and get set up is unpaid.

Many service workers rely on tips to survive, so that during slow periods, they earn next to nothing. Workers for delivery companies like Instacart are paid for the delivery—but not for the time to get back to the store they are delivering from.

All this unpaid work is one way the capitalist class has increased the exploitation of the working class.

Women workers are especially exploited. Seventy percent of the striking Air Canada flight attendants are female, and the company’s offer would leave the average flight attendant with a wage less than one third of that of the average pilot, most of whom are men. This kind of wage gap remains common: on average in the U.S., women earn about 83 cents on the dollar compared to male workers.

But even more importantly, the entire society relies on women’s unpaid labor done outside of their paid hours of work.

The capitalist class needs children to be raised—those are the next generation of workers it will exploit! Some fathers help with raising kids, but the vast majority of that work falls on women—mothers, sisters, stepmothers, grandmothers, aunts. This has remained true, even as women have had to work more and more hours outside the home.

Women also do the lion’s share of work taking care of elders—whether their own spouses, or parents, or in-laws.

When public services for children and elders are cut, as they have been for decades, women are expected to pick up the slack—driving kids around and watching them after school, caring for elders. The money taken from these services has been handed to the wealthy class in the form of tax breaks, bailouts, subsidies—in Canada, the U.S., and everywhere else. So, all the extra family labor falling on women is another result of the parasitic capitalist class sucking up society’s resources.

The Air Canada strikers did not accept this situation.

Flight attendants, if left to fight alone, might not have the power to throw back the Canadian government and the bosses. But each large strike like this has the potential to extend the struggle to other workers. The working class as a whole DOES have the power to throw back the capitalist class and all its governments, in Canada, the U.S., and everywhere else.

However this strike ends, whatever these flight attendants win in the short term, their strike is an example and a message. Women workers don’t have to accept to be always tired, always ground down to the bone—all so that billionaires can race each other to become trillionaires.