news and events
The Hidden History Behind WestJet’s Two Biggest Stories This Summer
Why the Strike and the Sexual Harassment Settlement are related
This month’s blog will be a little less legal, and a little more social.
WestJet has been in the news this summer. You are no doubt aware of the flight attendants’ strike which received so much news coverage, generating headlines like this:
(WestJet flight attendants on strike as company suspends most bookings)
Shamefully, the coverage focused primarily on the disruption to passengers rather than the demands of the workers – and we’re going to talk about that now, and the headline you may have missed:
(WestJet agrees to pay settlement in sexual harassment suit)
You might chalk this up to just a string of bad luck for WestJet in the month of August. The reality is, these two headlines are connected. Gendered workplace power structures and a male-dominated corporate leadership enabled institutional barriers to fair pay and a functional system for reporting and investigating harassment. Let’s dive into history to find out why.
It may come as a surprise to learn that historically, cabin crew were men! Taking their cue from commercial passenger ships and trains, men were hired because of the physical labour involved in loading baggage, setting up sleeping berths, and working long overnight shifts. There were also cultural assumptions from the 1800’s: men work in public spaces, women work in domestic spaces.
In the 1930’s, Ellen Church wanted to be a pilot. Despite the headline-making Amelia Earhart, women in 1930 were not considered capable of being commercial pilots. To get in the sky, Church pitched the idea that airlines needed nurses on board to help passengers overcome the fear of flying. Air travel in the 30’s was not the smooth experience of today. Planes were unpressurized, which meant they had to fly through storms rather over them. They bounced around in bad weather, were noisy, and air sickness was a common occurrence.
Church’s pitch worked, and she became the first female stewardess. In some ways this was a breakthrough for women, bringing them into a traditionally male space. However, it also fundamentally changed the approach to the job. It transitioned from hospitality provided by male stewards, to reassurance, caregiving and emotional support provided by women. Unsurprisingly, the switch also came with a decrease in pay.
Throughout the 1930’s and 40’s, women were marketed as symbols of hospitality, comfort and glamour. As commercial aviation expanded after World War II, airlines doubled down on portraying stewardesses as cheerful, attractive, available, and subservient to passengers. The pinnacle was National Airline’s controversial “Fly Me” series of ads in the 1970’s. The ad’s featured a women’s face and the tag line: “I’m Cheryl. Fly Me.”
Through this era, airlines had strict hiring policies, excluding men and requiring the women to be unmarried, childless, under a certain weight, and white (even if they didn’t always advertise it that way.)
Defenders of the status-quo may claim that the “Fly Me: ads are from a bygone era and that the industry has moved on. While anti-discrimination laws have changed the industry and ensured diversity, the reality is that today cabin crew workers are nearly 80% women and 60% white.
Transportation industries have repeatedly treated operational work differently from the customer-facing service work. On ships, railways, and planes, the labour of caring for passengers was given less value than the labour of operating the vessel. As airlines transitioned from hiring male stewards to female, those long-standing assumptions about service work became intertwined with gender expectations.
For example, cabin crews started being paid for only their flight hours. For those on international flights, this wasn’t so bad. For those doing short, domestic hops, this was disastrous. Boarding and security duties are a significant portion of the work, yet they are unpaid.
The feminization of the work, the de-valuing of the work, and the expectation of unpaid labour form the backdrop to the labour strikes this summer. These historic patterns of sexualization and subordination created the conditions that led to the sexual harassment suit. When women’s labour is routinely devalued and workers are trained to prioritize customer comfort over their own boundaries, harassment can flourish and reporting systems are less likely to be taken seriously.
The strike and the sexual harassment suit therefore both arise from the long history of gendered assumptions about cabin crew work, specifically the undervaluing and over-sexualization of work traditionally done by women. Let’s not pretend, however, that this is unique to the airline industry. This same pattern appears everywhere, including in the media. As reported by The Maple, media stories about passenger impact outranked stories of the workers demands by a ratio of 2 to 1.
Let’s contrast that to the headlines from the 2024 Pilot’s strike that was narrowly diverted. Pilot’s are mostly male. Using a similar but less rigorous methodology, and for illustrative rather than definitive purposes, I calculate that the Pilot’s Strike had a ratio of 1.6 to 1 when it came to stories about passenger inconvenience to pilot’s demands. Further, there were more headlines like the one from The Conversation that tried to place the pilot’s demands in context: Potential Air Canada pilot strike: Key FAQs and why the anger at pilots is misplaced.
Neither the cabin crew members who went on strike, nor the women who brought the lawsuit are victims of history. They are actively pursuing institutional accountability and challenging the status quo. The cabin crew were able to gain concessions at the negotiating table. The women who have been subject to sexual harassment now have financial compensation. The terms of the settlement include the usual disclaimer about liability, but the public nature of this agreement means that these workers are both seen and heard for what they experienced, and the company has been called to account.
Let’s hope that both of the headlines about WestJet this summer bring about some much needed change to both that airline, and the airline industry in general.
If you have experienced sexual harassment at work, we can help.
Call 1-833-677-5146 for free legal advice.
