If there was proper competition, then losing 10% of capacity wouldn't be a big deal, everyone would migrate to competitors, and the losing airlines would have to pay for those tickets to everyone who had their flight cancelled due to strike.

While I'm not a major fan about it, the idea of forcing workers back to the office has some logic in it, but shouldn't need to have been used if we had real competition. It's needed in industries where a vital service has no alternative, eg: ambulance.

Great question! Many ways:

1) Good flight attendants could migrate to better companies.

2) A strike could bankrupt a company if they were that negligent to take care and be fair with their employees.

3) There wouldn't be public pressure to end the strike because customers have other options.

4) Flight attendants _want_ any (possibly bad) deal because they love that job and Air Canada is actually the best employer for that in Canada. They have the routes and perks that others don't!

@purpleidea 1) untrue 2) a strike cause the money spigot to at least dry up if not in reverse. Whatever the position the company is in. Monopoly or not. 3) there is still public pressure because people have their tickets and feel entitled to fly 4) even then, it remains 1). the trope "one can find the same job elsewhere" is false. regardless of the industry.

Once again. The only thing that might have happened had it been Porter would have been the Govt not tripping on section 107....

@purpleidea @TheEvilSkeleton none of these arguments are valid.

The practice is actually industry wide. Also the illusion of "you can just switch jobs" (you can't just), etc.

There are much more competitive industries where wage theft and worker mistreatment is also the daily occurrence. And they may actually have even less leverage because of lack of unions and increased competitiveness.

@purpleidea my post (unintentionally) addresses that—they benefit workers and the "competition" until one company manages to stand out and capitalize, who then stops exercising people's rights because it no longer benefits them.

If anti-monopoly laws are the result of competition, then we should be asking ourselves whether competition caused people to care about workers' rights, or people who already cared about people's rights and actively fought to enforce protection of said rights who did.

@hub