This news article has to be the most ridiculous, OfficiallyScrewed thing that the Supreme Court of Canada has ever gotten involved in….. aside from Flipowich’s battle of the cow. The CBC is now reporting that the Supreme Court of Canada has opened the door for the Human Rights Commission to investigate if flight attendants, mechanics and pilots deserve the same pay.
| 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 case involving Air Canada employees dates back 15 years. |
Are we kidding here? This has been on the agenda for 15 years and no one told these people the three jobs have different criteria, different levels of education, and different supply curves creating for variance in the salaries?
| The commission had never analyzed pay rates because the dispute got hung up on the legal question of whether flight attendants, who are mostly women, and pilots and mechanics, who are mostly men, worked in the same “establishment.” |
And I suppose we should begin paying orderlies who clean up the bloody mess in operating rooms the same as the surgeon doing the cutting? Or how about paying the court recorders the same as the judges? Get stuffed.
| Air Canada held that the three groups should be treated separately in legal terms because they worked in different establishments. The human rights commission agreed, but two court cases followed, which delivered split decisions.
Air Canada appealed to the top court and lost. Now, the Supreme Court has ruled that the three groups do work in the same establishment. With that preliminary question resolved, Section 11 of the Canadian Human Rights Act comes into play. 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. |
Aye, there’s the rub. You can’t equate the work. Any way you slice it, the duties of both have similar aspects, as all jobs do. But the precision required, and knowledge and training, are quite different.
Does a flight attendant not take the safety of passengers into their own hands? They MIGHT in an emergency situation. But a pilot takes passenger’s safety into his/her hands the whole flight. It’s like comparing apples to oranges.
H/T to Black Sheep Press for this one.