Why doesn't my argument have merit? You didn't provide any rationale except to reference the Employment Standards Act, which no one else has brought up and isn't relevant here. You're right in that no one can be forced to work if they don't want to, but the proposed changes to the CARs wouldn't force anyone to work either, so I don't see how that's relevant. Employees are free to quit if they don't like the working conditions, but in a lot of cases that's not a realistic option; when I worked in the Arctic, it was the worst nadir of the recession, and there were literally no jobs available, so quitting wasn't a viable choice. I wouldn't even have been able to get EI if I left voluntarily. As long as they worked us within the limits of the CARs, there was no recourse, and most northern operators push their pilots to those limits every day. If you quit because you didn't want to work fourteen hours at a time, you'd have a hell of a time finding new work when you explained the reason you left in your interview. Unless the rules are changed to prevent that kind of abuse, employers will continue to force pilots to work fourteen-hour days with no alternative but to quit; it's not safe, but it's legal, so we don't have much recourse. Even in this era of hiring, management coerces young pilots into cooperating by reminding them that if they want the additional five hundred hours and a good reference to get on at Jazz, they'll go along to get along and keep their mouths shut. Frankly, I don't think your argument has any merit, because you haven't really made an argument, you've just ranted against the evils of regulations.Mick G wrote:[Your argument has no merit. The current employment standards act already takes care of your concerns (read here: https://www.ece.gov.nt.ca/en/services/e ... -standards).....do we now start to regulate marine, taxi drivers, bus drivers etc... in a way different than is already spelled out in the employment standards act???
You are lumping everyone together into a single group and unnecessarily focusing on one sector which has operated just fine for the last 100 years. You are just the type of person who is probably driving this recent and quite absurd Transport Canada rules...........remember this is a free country and no employee is forced to do anything
When I worked at that job in the Arctic, several pilots were told to do things that were illegal, and they went along with it because they were afraid of making waves. My last straw came when the company failed to manage the schedule properly, and they told me that I needed to keep working after I no longer could. I told them I had already worked to the CARs limits, so I wouldn't be able to. They told me to change my duty records to "make it work". I still refused, I immediately started looking for another job, and I quit the second I found one. Still, I couldn't afford to just leave because I was no longer comfortable working there, I had to wait until I found a replacement. The only thing that's different about flying in the north is that management thinks no one is watching and they can get away with anything. Any decent operators already employ enough pilots to give everyone a reasonable amount of time off, and only the cheap scummy companies run on min crew. I have no sympathy for businesses that are run like that, especially the ones that try to coerce pilots into doing things that are illegal just so they can make a little more profit. We need more stringent regs, because they'll take every inch they can get.
