Occupy Airports

A lot of people seem to be selfish, short sighted and stupid. I am thinking about the terrifying popularity of the Government of Canada's announcement that they will not allow Air Canada's flight attendants to exercise their right to collective bargaining by removing their leverage. Apparently flight attendants are an essential cog in our society. Despite the existence of competing airlines not going on strike. Really? Flight attendants are such essential workers that not even a portion of them can stop working? I wonder if this will still apply when the next round of layoffs are coming? And let's face it, air travel is an industry in contraction so layoffs are coming. But I digress. What I meant to be talking about is the future of working Canadians not the walking corpse that is Air Canada.

I don't see the recent position on the flight attendants as an isolated incident. I tie it together with the back to work legislation pushed on the Postal workers. Legislation that punished working class Canadians by imposing a lower wage than that offered by their employer.

A lot of people would say these jobs don't require a lot of education or skill and so the people doing these jobs are overpaid already. I see this as a dangerous game to get into. Who is to say you aren't overpaid too? Your rare skills are your job security? Well I was recently listening to a radio show on robotics that I thought was very interesting. The essential point I took from the show was that it's no coincidence that every job that is currently being done by computers or robots was once a job believed to be too complex for a machine to do.

It's basically a story of economics. It's only worth it to R&D machines to replace highly paid humans. Why make a really good sanitation robot when you can hire a human to do the same work for peanuts? But replacing a highly paid surgeon with a tireless robot who can do more surgeries, that's worth the price of admission. That's why right now, somewhere, someone is making progress on that very robot. And healthcare wait times means they probably have government funding.

So I guess there is a silver lining for the posties and flight attendants, if their pay gets low enough it'll be that much longer before automation has them looking for new careers.