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Tallest poppy syndrome

“Marooned by Air Canada flight attendant strike? Here are your options”.

A headline in the news. Biased framing right off the hop.

Here’s the thing. It's not the flight attendants who marooned folks. It’s corporate greed. 

It’s funny how frequently the general sentiment is to begrudge other people getting fairly compensated for their work. Yet each one of us would be unhappy to have our job demand hours of unpaid labour. Okay for thee and not for me?

This is why I am troubled by this framing. Sure, it’s just a headline, but it directs the understandable frustration of disrupted travel plans at the folks who are just asking for fair wages instead of at the executives who would rather create travel chaos than pay their staff.

It directs the blame for the strike at the workers who are exercising their right to strike when their reasonable demands are not met rather than at the executives who didn’t make any contingency plans for the strike because they expected the government to force the strikers back to work.  

In fact, if the executive dealt in good faith at the negotiating table, there wouldn’t be a strike at all.  

It is high time the general public reassesses where our sympathies lie: the comfortable middle class have more in common not only with striking workers but also the folks living in tent encampments than they do to the corporate decision-makers whose bonuses alone are larger than our annual salaries. 

In all the stories about the postal strike last year, not a one of them seriously delved into the postal workers’ side of the story. What working conditions distress them so much that they’d risk alienating the public at Christmas time in a desperate bid to get the executives to treat them with fairness? Why do we begrudge that federal workers (used to) make a solid wage that allowed for a comfortable life doing an job like mail delivery instead of celebrating that  those workers serve the country and receive fair compensation for doing so?

It would be nice to see headlines reflect that reality too, instead of subtly skewing sympathies toward the supposed hardships of the overcompensated elites whose priority is increasing their vast wealth, not serving the public good.

 

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