Looming strike: Are Air Canada pilots underpaid? | About That

Air Canada may be about to freeze operations their pilots are threatening to go on strike if they don't start earning a lot more money meaning by early next week 670 flights a day could be cancelled affecting hundreds of thousands of people we begin tonight with the travel nightmare in the making Air Canada is on the brink of a major shutdown we're losing bookings as we speak I would be stuck in the US now the question at hand isn't whether Air Canada Pilots should be paid more it's how much more they should be paid Air Canada has reportedly offered Pilots a 30% pay increase over 3 years but the pilots said no 30% doesn't get it which sounds like real Hardball right but let's try to understand how the industry has changed and why Air Canada Pilots feel so strongly about demanding so [Music] much so the Pilot's argument for more pay boils down to a very simp simple comparison Air Canada has a significant number of people Pilots that are in that lower wage scale that are saying listen we're getting paid 75,000 bucks a year to fly a Triple 7 as a first officer and south of the board the guys are getting paid 300,000 for the same job same flight same piece of equipment so the saying wait a there's something wrong with this picture now not all Air Canada Pilots are making 75 grand a year a recent job posting shows a captain of 12 years experience can make more than 300 $1,000 a year but that same Captain might make 60% more in the US and here are the pay increases for Pilots at three major American Airlines compare that to what Air Canada Pilots have had in their contracts a 2% pay increase per year or about 8% over four years when you look at that environment Pilots at Air Canada are justifiably upset and anxious that their own pay stubs have not kept up with the rest of the industry but why you might ask have wages in the rest of the industry shot up so dramatically well consider what the American airline industry looked like just a couple years ago among the industry's hardest hit by the pandemic and economic turndown is the airline industry by some estimates North American Airlines lost about 63 billion in 2020 people just weren't traveling the pandemic meant that they couldn't in a lot of cases and Airlines couldn't afford to keep all the pilots they had on staff you'll remember reports like these ones airports became ghost towns this is though where they are now parking aircraft American is doing it United planes are down the way a little bit uh they're just stacked up here cuz nobody's flying they're not flying the aircraft and consequently they don't need the pilots now the most expensive planes in the big Airlines fleets parked wide body Jets no longer needed with just about every international flight scrubbed there were layoffs and many Pilots were offered incentives to leave at Delta Airlines alone 1,800 Pilots agreed to early retirement programs the guys who had 35 40 45 years of service yeah they bought them out frankly no one knew at that point how quickly the industry would recover if at all but fast forward a couple years and that recovery was well underway by the end of 2022 around 76 million passengers a month were flying on US Airlines very nearly back to pre-pandemic levels it went almost in a Flash uh from a pilot um glut to a pilot shortage so they went from having way too many Pilots to having not enough Pilots you might remember all the chaos that caused it became a fixture on nightly cable news travel app Hopper reports more than a quarter of recent flights have been delayed fueled by industry Staffing shortages soaring demand and severe weather it was Revenge travel and we had people hanging around airports if you remember tens of thousands of lost bags hundreds of flights delayed they had no staff to be able to do all these things so the airlines you know went a little nuts the result of all of this US Airlines were scrambling to refill those pilot positions that they cut to meet this demand and all of a sudden if you were a pilot pilot you had a lot of Leverage timing is everything and um most of the US pilot agreements were being negotiated at a time of this severe shortage so when you've got that situation of a shortage you end up with um wage demands uh and Pilots really valuing themselves in line with the market demands there's a lot of responsibility riding on our shoulders when we get into the flight deck and we want to get to the destinations safely and efficiently we don't want to be in this position we need Air Canada to negotiate a fair agreement with us so if you're a pilot in Canada watching all of this unfold in the US seeing your American counterparts doing the same routes flying the same planes making twice as much money you might see two choices one you could leave and many Pilots are in 2022 three times more Canadian Pilots applied for American Commercial licenses than the year before and Air Canada is forecasting that unless they take care of those Pilots there's about 800 Air Canada pilots who are ready to jump ship in heads up and by some estimates US Airlines will need as many as 5400 new pilots in the next few years so there's opportunity and that's a problem for Air Canada especially considering there has been a shortage of Pilots here as well last year St John Calgary Penton they all saw Air Canada routes slashed because of a lack of Pilots so Air Canada needs to negotiate hence its offer of a 30% pay bump over 3 years and Air Canada Pilots know they have leverage and frankly the companies haven't disputed that hence their rejection of Air Canada's offer so now things could get messy [Music] it's quite worrisome because I'm here and how will I get back am I going to be stuck in New Finland until the 24th I I don't know it's a little stressful Air Canada's position has been pretty straightforward an increase in Pay brings an increase in ticket prices and in a statement this week the CEO said the Pilot's wage demands far exceed average Canadian wage increases it's true the average Canadian isn't seeing anywhere near a 30% pay increase like what Air Canada is offering its pilots and you know it does go without saying American pay is almost always higher than Canadian pay WestJet Pilots recently secured a 24% increase and Sunwing Pilots slightly more than that Air Canada's position is that its reported offer of 30% is more than fair and the one thing I can most definitely guarantee at the end of this process is that Air Canada of Pilots will be the best paid commercial airline pilots in Canada but the pilots Union hit back telling CBC Air Canada continues to post record profits and reward its Executives handsomely while expecting Pilots to accept below Market compensation and the union goes on to call out Air Canada's corporate greed Air Canada has succeeded financially quite well as a corporation and that they are able to invest in their pilot grou group we know when we look at executive compensation um since 2015 it's doubled as early as this Sunday the union could issue a 72-hour strike notice that would start a 3-day windown plan that would eventually see more than a 100,000 daily Air Canada passengers scrambling for other arrangements and taking to Tik Tock to vent they will be cancelling all of the flights that really sucks for me because if I miss this training it's a lot of money out of my pocket what I'm frustrated with as a Canadian is I only have two options it's like a freaking gamble every time because you don't know who's going to go on straight and if things get to that point a full Airline shutdown Air Canada says it would take at least a week to get operations back to normal it's why there's one other outcome potentially on the table if the two sides can't find a middle ground in time the government could step in we're also hearing directly from Air Canada uh uh adding their list to a dozens of business groups including the K Chamber of Commerce asking for the government to intervene for now it says it's staying out of the labor dispute but it said the exact same thing during a recent Railway lockout where within 24 hours it had reversed course sending both sides into binding arbitration and there are already calls for the government to do the same with Air Canada Pilots