Sixteen days apart this month, two disputes ended over the same idea. On Aug. 2, 4,400 WestJet flight attendants walked off the job and grounded most of a long-weekend schedule. On Aug. 18, an interest arbitration board chaired by William Kaplan released an award covering more than 4,000 registered nurses and other health-care staff at 210 Ontario nursing homes.
One fight was loud enough to strand 250,000 travellers. The other was decided in a closed room with no one watching. Both were about work that happens off the clock.
The nursing home version was the older of the two. For decades, the collective agreement explicitly said that employees required to stay for shift-change reporting would remain at work up to 15 minutes, and that the time would be unpaid. It was not an oversight. It was written down, agreed to and renewed through 16 rounds of joint bargaining going back to the early 1990s.
Kaplan ended it in his ruling. Transfer of Accountability reporting is now time worked, paid at the rate of the shift just completed. He called the old provision “an archaic relic of a bygone era.”
His award, interestingly, was something neither side asked for specifically.
The Ontario Nurses’ Association wanted the unpaid clause gone. The nursing homes proposed a flat rate reflecting typical time spent, for administrative convenience.
The airlines arrived first
The airlines got to the same destination first, and more expensively. WestJet’s credit hour system pays cabin crew largely for time the aircraft is moving, which leaves boarding, delays and pre-flight checks outside the clock. The strike lasted a day. The tentative deal that followed includes more than 18 per cent over three years and a new duty period premium covering ground work, with the union saying it phases in toward full compensation for uncredited time by the end of 2028. Their ratification vote closes today.
Air Canada’s crew struck a year ago over the same issue and ended up in binding arbitration, which produced compensation for pre-flight duties climbing toward 70 per cent of the hourly rate. Delta Airlines started this ball rolling in 2022, the first North American carrier to pay flight attendants for work on the ground. American and Alaska followed at 50 per cent.
The floor, not the rate
Most readers will assume all of this was illegal and has now been corrected. Mostly, it was not.
Ontario’s Employment Standards Act, for example, exempts a long list of health professionals from minimum wage, overtime and hours-of-work limits. Physicians, dentists, pharmacists, physiotherapists, psychologists, optometrists, chiropractors. Nurses are not on that list. They are covered. The regulation is even helpful on the point: Work counts as work if it was in fact performed, whether or not the contract forbids or limits it. Unauthorized does not mean unperformed.
But what the act guarantees is a floor, not your own rate for every minute you are on the premises. It requires at least minimum wage across the hours worked, and time and a half past 44 in a week. Fifteen unpaid minutes at the end of a nurse’s shift does not drag average earnings below $17.60. The statute has nothing to say about it.
That math explains how the airline fight unfolded. When CUPE wrote to the jobs minister in May attacking the carriers’ self-audits, the claim was not that senior flight attendants were underpaid in law. It was that junior ones effectively fall below minimum wage once boarding, security screening and pre-flight checks are counted. Ottawa’s first-phase findings, published in February, found little evidence that unpaid work was widespread but flagged part-time and entry-level crew for a closer look.
Both sides understood where the floor bites, which is only at the bottom.
The co-author problem
The other reason these practices survived is structural. Under Ontario’s employment standards legislation, an employee covered by a collective agreement cannot file an employment standards claim. They grieve instead. The enforcement route for a nurse who thought the unpaid 15 minutes offended the act ran through the union that had signed it, in every round, for 30 years. The ministry was out of jurisdiction. The union was the co-author. In short, the two mechanisms best positioned to notice the problem (the law and organized labour) were the two least likely to raise it.
Non-union employers should not take comfort from that. What they have instead is a workforce with no grievance procedure and no economist costing out the gap, in a jurisdiction where the same statutory floor applies. Salaried professionals arriving 20 minutes early to prep, retail staff cashing out after close, support workers finishing charting off the clock. If the effective hourly rate stays above minimum and nobody crosses 44 hours, the law is satisfied and the practice is invisible until someone with leverage decides to price it.
What changed for nurses and flight attendants was not the legislation. It was that unpaid work started to feel like a corporate subsidy. Once Delta started to pay staff for boarding, every other carrier’s refusal became a choice and not an industry fact. Once one arbitrator called the reporting clause unfair, the next one could adopt the reasoning without appearing to invent anything. Kaplan borrowed from it from a 2025 hospital award.
The unpaid 15 minutes for the nurses was never really defended. It also may have not even been debated at the bargaining table. It was just a fact, renewed 16 times, until someone finally said no.
The obvious lesson to take from both cases (and common sense) is this: No employee wants to work for free. Not for an hour, not for 15 minutes, whether it is handing a patient off to the next shift or to help board an aircraft.
Employers who still have a version of this on the books have a choice about how it ends. You can fix it in your own policies or wait until it lands in front of a judge or arbitrator.
