Flying the Equitable Skies

Canada is full of government crackpots, institutional nutcases and socialist euphorians, and now it seems all these fools have some legal traction:

Canada's top court has given the country's human rights commission the go-ahead to investigate whether flight attendants should be paid the same as pilots and airline mechanics. The Canadian Union of Public Employees began the case in 1991, arguing that the airline discriminated because it paid attendants differently "for what it argued was equally valuable work performed by mechanical personnel and pilots." The section says it is discriminatory for an employer to pay different wages to male and female employees in the same "establishment" who are performing work of equal value.

The union is trying to get flight attendants paid the same as pilots by claiming they do equitable work in the same "establishment." The preposterousness of this thinking is stunning. Given Air Canada's fiscal condition, they would be cutting pilot pay to match that of flight attendants rather than entertain the folly of what the union is trying to pull off.

If this goes through, I think the very first Air Canada flight should a trans-Atlantic jaunt full of judges and union officials. It should be a plane exclusively serviced and flown by flight attendants. I mean, the skills and training of flight attendants are basically identical to those of commercial pilots and airframe mechanics, right?