Wage theft became public conversation last August, when Air Canada flight attendants manifested their “Unpaid work won’t fly” campaign in strike action. A year on, their WestJet colleagues followed suit, backed by a 99% strike mandate.
In both cases, the core issue was the industry’s credit hour system, which effectively sets the wage clock to flying time, leaving crew unpaid for the work of boarding passengers, security checks, delayed departures and deplaning.
Canadians are with the workers. Abacus Data polling conducted in July 2026 for the CUPE WestJet Component found that 85% of respondents saw it as reasonable to demand pay for all duties performed.
How would Canadians feel knowing that our post-secondary students are likewise taught by people who routinely work unpaid hours? Many of these are baked into contracts reminiscent of the airlines’ credit system, organized around block hours but encompassing duties that are, at best, partially compensated.
Thus, contract academic staff (CAS) — especially, but not exclusively, sessional lecturers — are routinely expected to design and prepare courses before their pay starts. Many continue working after their last paycheque, whether grading late exams and assignments, mentoring students, or writing them reference letters.
Some go much further.
In my own union, the assigned duties of academic staff on teaching contracts are limited to “teaching as defined” in the collective agreement with Memorial University. Teaching for us includes preparing and delivering courses to applicable institutional and accreditation standards, evaluating students’ work and advising them during office hours, plus a “professional duty to maintain their scholarly competence and effectiveness as teachers.”
The last item carries very different implications for permanent than for term-limited employees, who may not know what, where or whether they will teach from semester to semester. And while everyone has grappled with pedagogical upheaval following the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of generative artificial intelligence, permanent staff do that work on the clock. CAS are responsible for maintaining their professional capacity whether currently employed or not. Their next job depends on it.
Many CAS, including my colleagues profiled in this issue’s feature article, also perform significant collegial governance and service work for their department, the institution and their discipline. They attend orientation and outreach events for students. Some conduct and disseminate research, do peer reviews, and even organize speaker series and conferences, often without institutional or agency support such as grants or publication subventions.
Or they did so before their contracts were eliminated in the wave of invisible job cuts on campuses across the country.
Whether reflecting a sense of vocation, responsibility, care for colleagues and students, or hope that a good record will secure another position, such unpaid labour has done more than benefit our institutions. It has sustained them. Contingent labour, including all the associated unpaid work, is not ancillary to Canadian post-secondary education. It has become integral to the core functions of universities and colleges.
The job losses highlighted in this issue may soon reveal just how integral, as permanent colleagues face increasingly impossible workloads and students lose educational options. Those job cuts also remind us that contingent employment shifts risk from the institution onto individual workers.
CAS bear the brunt of this externalization, but as I outlined in a previous column, precarity ultimately harms us all; combating it and fighting for fair, secure and fulfilling work is a key priority in the strategic plan adopted by delegates at CAUT’s 100th Council meeting this spring.
We are indebted to flight attendants for exposing the inequity of routine wage theft and for reminding us that systemic unfairness can only be fought with organized collective action.
The fight is not over.
As CAUT members ramp up, guided by our strategic plan, we must build a common front across our differences and with workers in other sectors, not least because the federal and many provincial governments so clearly have labour rights in the crosshairs. An airport security worker captured the stakes when Air Canada flight attendants defied the federal government’s reflexive back-to-work order in 2025, observing that “they’re speaking for every union now.”
In the same spirit, this Bulletin coincides with CAUT’s Contract Academic Staff conference, Stronger Together. There’s no better way to put it.
