It is time to ask an uncomfortable question: should airlines remain unionized?

Every time an airline labour dispute erupts, the public is told that the conflict is between employees and management. It is not.

The travelling public is the third party in every negotiation. Families miss weddings. Students miss examinations. Businesses lose contracts. Vacations planned years in advance disappear overnight. Increasingly, these costs are treated as collateral damage in collective bargaining.

Perhaps it is time to ask a question that would once have been politically unthinkable: should commercial airlines—critical national infrastructure upon which millions depend—continue to operate under a labour-relations model that permits widespread disruption to the public?

This is not an argument against fair wages. Flight attendants, mechanics, and pilots deserve to be paid fairly for demanding and highly skilled work. But good public policy requires us to examine not only the benefits of wage increases, but also their full economic and social costs.

Economists call these externalities—costs imposed on people who are not parties to the original transaction.

Thousands of travellers suffered significant financial losses because of the WestJet disruption, and the internet is filled with similar accounts. Global News reported that one traveller faced losses of between $5,000 and $10,000. Another passenger lost approximately $7,000 in prepaid hotel bookings that were not covered by insurance. These are not isolated cases. Even two or three days of flight disruption can produce thousands of comparable stories.

During WestJet’s 2024 mechanics dispute, passengers incurred additional costs for rental cars, hotel stays, replacement flights, and extended accommodation, often while struggling to obtain reimbursement. In some cases, travel-insurance claims were denied because labour disruptions fell outside policy coverage.

These losses rarely appear in official calculations of the cost of a labour dispute. Yet, they are real economic costs transferred from employers and employees to innocent travellers, and, ultimately, to society.

This week’s WestJet disruption illustrates the scale. Nearly 500 flights were cancelled over the August long weekend, affecting roughly 250,000 passengers in only three days. WestJet estimated that the disruption was costing the airline between $10-million and $15-million a day.

But those figures tell only part of the story.

What is the value of a missed business opportunity? A cancelled conference? Lost tourism spending? Emergency childcare? A missed cruise departure? Non-refundable accommodation? A specialist medical appointment? A long-awaited family reunion?

These costs rarely enter wage negotiations, yet society pays them nonetheless.

Even insured losses are not free. Insurance does not eliminate costs; it redistributes them. Claims today contribute to higher premiums tomorrow. The public pays either directly or indirectly.

The broader inflationary effects also deserve scrutiny.

Large wage settlements in highly visible sectors rarely remain isolated. They establish new benchmarks. Airline workers negotiate higher compensation. Other transportation workers seek parity. Public-sector unions point to comparable settlements. Universities face pressure to raise salaries. Governments finance larger payrolls. Private employers adjust compensation to remain competitive.

Businesses recover at least some of these costs through higher prices. Governments respond through higher taxes, reduced services, or increased borrowing. Households ultimately absorb the consequences.

No single wage settlement causes inflation. But when compensation rises across multiple sectors without corresponding productivity gains, the cumulative effect can reinforce broader price pressures.

Since COVID-19, Canadians have experienced persistent inflation driven by supply disruptions, labour shortages, housing costs, and other structural pressures. Wage growth has understandably become a response to higher prices. Yet, higher wages can also contribute to future price increases when productivity does not keep pace.

The result can become a cycle in which everyone earns more nominally while purchasing power improves very little.

The irony is that many of those harmed most by repeated transportation disruptions are working Canadians themselves.

A family that has saved for years for a vacation loses its deposits. A small-business owner misses a contract. A student misses orientation. A patient misses specialist treatment.

None of these people has a seat at the bargaining table. Their interests are represented by neither the employer nor the union.

Many countries already recognize that some services are too important to permit prolonged work stoppages. Police officers, firefighters, and some health-care workers operate under compulsory arbitration or essential-services rules because the public interest limits the unrestricted right to strike.

Commercial aviation increasingly resembles this category. It is no longer a luxury. It underpins business investment, tourism, supply chains, education, immigration, and family life across a country as geographically vast as Canada.

That does not necessarily require eliminating unions. It does require reconsidering whether airline employees—and airlines themselves—should retain the ability to withdraw services in ways that impose massive costs on millions of uninvolved Canadians.

Mandatory arbitration, final-offer selection, or essential-service designation may provide a better balance between workers’ rights and the public interest.

The debate should not be about whether airline employees deserve fair compensation.

They do.

The Gulf carriers demonstrate that fair and internationally competitive compensation does not depend exclusively on adversarial collective bargaining. Emirates and Qatar Airways offer tax-free salaries, accommodation, transportation, insurance, and travel benefits without the recurring strike threat embedded in Canada’s current labour-relations model.

Canada should not import Gulf labour law. The political, legal, and employment environments are too different. But Canada should ask whether essential transportation services require a different domestic model—one that protects fair compensation, preserves independent employee representation, and guarantees impartial dispute resolution while preventing employers and employees from imposing disproportionate losses on passengers and the wider economy.

A practical Canadian alternative could include mandatory arbitration for essential national airline services, transparent industry wage benchmarking, full compensation for all duty time, profit-sharing, enforceable benefits, and independent employee representation.

The real question is whether millions of Canadians should continue paying the hidden costs of achieving fair compensation through recurring disruption.

Public policy should measure success not only by wages won or profits protected, but also by the total cost imposed on society.

If we accounted for every cancelled vacation, lost business opportunity, uninsured expense, increased insurance premium, and inflationary ripple associated with major transportation labour disputes, we might conclude that the present system is far more expensive than anyone at the bargaining table is being asked to pay.

Perhaps the time has come to reconsider not the value of organized labour, but the way organized labour operates in industries upon which the entire economy depends.

Dr. Akolisa (Ako) Ufodike is an associate professor at York University, and a former Alberta deputy minister of trade, immigration, and multiculturalism.

The Hill Times