On August 16 Air Canada flight attendants stood up against an employer that is hanging onto unpaid labour. On August 17, they defied back to work legislation from a government that didn’t even give them one day to stand up for their rights. And on September 6 in an unprecedented move, they rejected their union leadership’s compromises. And all these actions were almost unanimous among the workers. It’s been a long time since we have had such labour militancy and yet public opinion was massively on their side. What’s going on?
For me it brought to mind another experience I had this summer, speaking to a conference of the Ontario Nurses Association (ONA). I’ve been active in the labour movement for decades and the nurses were never very present. Then I heard the speech of the President Erin Ariss opening the conference, promising a major campaign in the fall to defend the rights of home care nurses who, like flight attendants, are not paid for some of their work and paid very little for the rest.
This week she launched that campaign:
“Home care RNs are the lowest-paid nurses in the province, despite facing among the worst working conditions. The system is hanging by a thread now. Understaffed, unsafe and underpaid RNs are leaving the sector, as the largely female workers face a staggering amount of violence – five times that of nurses in other health-care sectors.”
And lest we forget the Ontario education support workers who in 2022 defied a back to work order from the Doug Ford government with the support of the entire labour movement threatening a general strike.
All these unions are majority female, women led and care workers. In a moment when our Prime Minister is trying to sell us an economy based on extraction, construction and transportation, an economy that relies on big corporations making megabucks from mostly male labour, these women workers are reminding us of what’s most important. It’s extraordinary that the flight attendants had 66 per cent public support and 88 per cent who believed flight attendants should be paid for all their work. Ask anyone who has been in hospital what they valued most and they will answer the nurses. In schools, support workers help those who need most assistance.
In 2025, we still massively undervalue women’s work and care work. Why are nurses and flight attendants paid so poorly? Because they do the work that women have always done mostly for free. Without the unpaid work of women in the home and the underpaid work in the workforce, our economy would collapse and yet when our Prime Minister or Premier talk about the economy, they talk about the old economy, the industrial economy with barely a mention of those who care for us and for our children.
Having women spokespeople for the arms industry and the oil industry is no step towards equality. Women acting to support patriarchal structures is no victory for feminism. But women labour leaders able to represent an increasingly militant workforce is an important contribution from my generation of feminism.
I have written before how unique Canada is in the connection between the feminist movement and the labour movement. During the struggle to legalize abortion, we relied on the support of the labour movement to defend the Morgentaler clinic. Grace Hartman was President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees in 1975, the first woman to lead a Canadian union. But that’s not all. Feminists in Ontario and Saskatchewan organized a group called Organized Working Women in the mid-1970’s that trained women in the labour movement how to participate in conventions and organized feminist solidarity pickets when women in the textile industry went on strike.
In this time of terrible trouble where it seems that everything my generation fought for is at stake, it makes sense to me that women workers will lead the resistance and insist that women’s work be valued and treasured in our economy.
And it’s not just the pay scale that’s important. After my speech at the ONA, I encouraged the audience to tell their stories and woman after woman told of violence in the workplace, of being beaten bloody by a disturbed patient, of facing terrible racism and sexism with little or no support. The flight attendants too speak of the violence, they sometimes face. But despite this, they continue to serve, to help, to support. They should not have to deal with such violence and that’s part of the struggle to end patriarchy. But their courage, their persistence, their ability to work with people who they don’t like, even who have hurt them, is inspiring and helps us to understand what we need to transform our society.
In the early days of my generation of feminists that academics call second wave, a major slogan was “no more patriarchy, no more shit.” But we didn’t root out patriarchy. We vastly improved the lives of many women, but patriarchy persists at every level of our society. The struggles of the flight attendants, nurses and the educational support workers show us what’s really important to our lives.
Today by demanding that women’s work be valued, we are demanding that we stop valuing making more and more money for the rich as the basis for the economy. What else is the GDP? And start valuing the work of women, immigrants and all those whose work support our lives and our communities.
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