Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government may think it smart politics to come down hard on unionized workers like Air Canada flight attendants. In the short term, it probably is.

Even without labour disruptions, air travel is a nightmare. So if the airline’s flight attendants do go on strike Thursday as planned, many Canadians will be cheering the government as it hustles back-to-work legislation though the Commons.

What they — and the Harper government — forget is that Canada’s messy labour relations system exists for a reason.

People don’t like being pushed around at work. They’ll put up with a certain amount of grief, depending on how fearful they are.

But at some point, enough is enough. In one way or another, they fight back.

Legal strikes allow this bitterness to express itself in carefully managed ways. To outlaw strikes is to encourage that anger to express itself in a different and more creative fashion.

If Harper and Labour Minister Lisa Raitt need any reminder of this, they need look no farther than another group of air travel employees.

These are the roughly 1,600 unionized security screeners at Toronto’s Pearson Airport employed by Garda World Security Corp., a private firm whose job is to ensure that terrorists don’t board airplanes.

Screeners make between $15.57 and $21.16 an hour to inspect passengers and their luggage. A few months ago, their employer tried to cut costs by replacing better-paid full-time workers with part-timers.

As the Star has reported, Garda now wants its workers to bid against each in order to keep down the wage differentials it pays those who do the worst shifts.

Shift-bidding, as it is called, strikes directly at the heart of unions. It allows the employer to pit one worker against another in a search for the most desperate.

Some have reported that the scheme is often used in hospitals. That’s just not true, says Michael Hurley, president of the Ontario College of Hospital Unions — at least not in this country.

“There are no such bidding schemes I’ve ever heard of in Ontario or anywhere in Canada,” Hurley says. “It’s absolutely prohibited in collective agreements. We bargain set rates of pay for everyone, and that’s it.”

Since Pearson’s security screeners are bound by an existing contract, they can’t strike legally. The Canadian Industrial Relations Board has ruled that they can’t even stage a work-to-rule campaign, a tactic that workers in bureaucratized industries often use.

But they’ve been working to rule anyway, checking every passenger thoroughly and consistently to ensure that none is loaded with explosives.

The result, of course, has been massive back-ups at Pearson and even more headaches for Raitt.

Garda says it has suspended 74 Pearson employees who were too diligent in their screening. But how can the state and its agents logically penalize security workers who, in this age of terror alerts, are scrupulously applying the government’s own rules?

Do Canadians really want their air travel safety to depend on a set of underpaid, angry and demoralized screeners?

For Air Canada’s flight attendants, the screeners’ campaign suggests a new form of industrial action to use now that the Conservative government has moved to prevent a strike.

Air travel is chock-a-block with rules. If flight attendants adhered strictly to these rules, they could almost certainly disrupt Air Canada’s schedule enough to pressure the company.

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And if the government legislated against that, the flight attendants could try something else.

There are many ways for angry employees to demonstrate their feelings. A legal strike is only the most civilized.

Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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