Top court sides with airline attendants
Air Canada's flight attendants have won a victory in the Supreme Court of Canada that will help them step up a 15-year-long fight to get pay equity with other, male-dominated groups of airline employees.
The ruling is seen as a landmark decision that will likely speed up the resolution of other pay equity disputes at federally regulated organizations -- where past cases have sometimes taken decades to reach a final conclusion.
The top court's unanimous ruling said the flight attendants can compare their pay with that of pilots and ground crews, because they all work for the same organization in the same business.
Air Canada had argued that each of the groups is covered under a different collective agreement, so the comparison should not be made.
The Supreme Court judges did not rule on the merits of the flight attendants' complaint, but sent it back to the Canadian Human Rights Commission to determine whether they were actually discriminated against.
Writing for the court, Mr. Justice Louis LeBel and Madam Justice Rosalie Abella criticized Air Canada for dragging the case out for 15 years.
The airline created "enormous expense for itself and the public, and intolerable delay in wage equity, should the flight attendants ultimately succeed," the judges wrote.
They said narrow technical interpretations of legislation could "sterilize human rights laws and defeat their very purpose."
Pamela Sachs, president of the Air Canada component of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), said flight attendants scored a legal victory, but it will be years before that translates into possible wage increases for union members currently on Air Canada's payroll.
Women account for roughly 80 per cent of the 7,000 flight attendants represented by CUPE, said Ms. Sachs, who added that most earn between $20,000 and $80,000, but relatively few are near the top end of the scale. By contrast, most pilots have a starting salary of about $70,000 a year, with veteran captains making in the neighbourhood of $150,000 a year or more.
"This decision by the Supreme Court of Canada opens the door for real work to be done on this pay equity issue. Our predominantly female work force has been discriminated against," she said, noting that men account for the vast majority of pilot jobs.
Air Canada spokesman Peter Fitzpatrick said that while the airline is still reviewing the high court's decision, there hasn't been any judgment on the merits of CUPE's claims. "We believe that any investigation will show that wage negotiations will meet equal pay standards," he said.
Peter Engelmann, a lawyer for the Communications Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada, which intervened in the case, said the ruling should help speed up other pay equity disputes by removing one of the procedural arguments that employers have used in the past.
"The court has clearly said to Air Canada and to other employers, 'Don't waste our time with these types of arguments,' " he said.
He noted that the decision affects only federal regulated institutions, a group that includes the big banks, transportation firms, and telecommunications companies. Other employees are covered by provincial pay equity legislation.
Toronto labour lawyer Victoria Reaume said some provincial equity laws -- such as Ontario's -- explicitly spell out what groups of employees can be compared for pay equity purposes, but the federal rules were less clear until yesterday's ruling. "The struggle for pay equity at the federal level has been an enormous one, a costly one, a time-consuming one and a very frustrating one for women in the federal sector," she said.
One case still in the works involves 20 years of alleged wage discrimination at Canada Post. The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled last fall that the post office should pay $150-million to 6,000 clerical workers -- mostly women -- who received less than mail sorters. The decision was immediately appealed to the Federal Court.
The Air Canada case is also very long running. It has been working its way through tribunals and appeal courts since 1991, when CUPE first complained to the human rights commission.
The commission said the case was legitimate, but a tribunal convened to hear the issue ruled that the flight attendants could not compare their salaries to those of pilots and ground staff because the groups worked for different "establishments," governed by different collective agreements.
The Federal Court agreed with the tribunal, but the Federal Court of Appeal said the comparison was okay. The Supreme Court has now agreed with the Appeals court and has come down on the side of the flight attendants' right to make the pay comparisons.
