Airline’s flight attendants say they love their jobs
Flight attendants with Air North have filed an application with the federal government to form a union.
Photo by Whitehorse Star
Pictured Above: Joe Sparling and Steve Geick
Flight attendants with Air North have filed an application with the federal government to form a union.
The documents were sent to the Canada Industrial Relations Board earlier this week.
If approved, the group would be the first union at the locally-owned airline.
The flight attendants are seeking to be represented by the Yukon Employees Union (YEU).
However, they first need certification from the board, YEU president Steve Geick told the Star this week.
As for why the group of about 30 employees want to be unionized, Geick said that information will come out in time.
Now that the application has been filed, the next step is to have it accepted, he said.
“Then the next step in the process would be contacting management of Air North and starting to negotiate a first agreement, which is where any motivation will become apparent, when we start negotiating our first collective agreement.”
Geick said the employees have “expressed that they really loved their job and really loved working in the Yukon.”
The flight attendants at Air North do not work under a contract but the company does have internal policies regulating things like pay and working conditions, Air North president Joe Sparling said this week.
Sparling said he found out about the application Monday through a fax from the labour board.
Employees have not expressed to him what motivated their decision, he said, adding that the application took him by surprise.
“We certainly support the notion of having a mechanism where the employees can be represented as a group,” he told the Star.
“As our company grows, it’s certainly becoming more and more difficult to do business with employees on an individual basis, he said.
“Twenty years ago, that was the only way we dealt with employees. It was on an individual basis – usually me sitting across the table from them. We’ve obviously outgrown that.”
As for whether a union is the right way to go to create the mechanism he was talking about, Sparling wouldn’t say.
“I don’t think I’m at liberty to express a preference or provide comment on that,” he said.
An application to become a union requires the signatures from at least a simple majority of employees.
Geick would not say how much of the majority signed the initial application.
The case has been handed over to an investigator with the board, spokesperson Ginette Brazeau said Thursday.
“It will be processed, investigated by an officer, and then it will be sent to a panel of the board for determination.”
That process takes between 60 and 90 days on average, she said.
Air North will also have a chance to respond to the application.
“It needs to be a majority,” Geick said.
“So the employer may feel that some of the employees have supervisory or management-type duties that would exclude them from a union.
“So they get to file a response and we get to respond to their response. It’s the board that makes the decision.”
The company is required to post a notice to employees in the workplace to advise them of the application.
Geick said having unionized employees can be beneficial to both the employees and the company.
He rejects the idea that the relationship between a union and a company is automatically an adversarial one, insisting his role is more as a mediator.
“There’s always a time and a place for an adversarial role if it comes to that,” he said.
“I would rather go into open and frank conversation so we don’t get to a point where one party feels they need to take an adversarial role.”
Sparling said employees have always been a key part of the business.
“Our employees are the backbone of the company. We recognize that; we always have,” he said.
“We always endeavour to conduct ourselves in an open and transparent manner that best represents the interest of all of our stakeholders starting with our customers, our employees and our shareholders in exactly that order. We’ll continue to do that.”
Air North was founded on Feb. 1, 1977, initially as a charter business.
The company has more than 200 full and part-time employees, most of them based in the North.
The airline began scheduled service to Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary 11 years ago.
Scare North
Jan 11, 2013 at 7:06 pm
If Air North is so great to its employees, this would not be occurring. I’m sick and tired of how great and magical everyone thinks Air North is. Sick and tired of reading letters in the paper because you had diarrhea and they rerouted the plane and you need to tell the whole world about it. The image that Air north projects is vastly different from reality. I know some employees and what they tell me makes me not want to ever fly Air north.