Part‐time Shift: The Struggle over the Casualization of Airline Customer Sales and Service Agent Work*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Par L'examen du conflit, dans les années 1980, entourant L'utilisation par Air Canada de travailleuses et travailleurs à temps partiel pour réaliser le travail d'agentes et agents de ventes et de service à la clientèle, cet article vise à développer nos connaissances de la précarisation du travail col‐blanc des femmes dans le secteur des services dans un contexte de restructuration économique ainsi que du rôle joué par les syndicats dans le façonnement du rapport d'emploi. L'étude analyse comment les efforts d'Air Canada pour rendre le travail plus flexible colorèrent les négotiations collectives et incitèrent les agentes et agents à faire la grève pour la première fois de leur histoire et à intégrer leur syndicat à un syndicat plus puissant et militant. L'article se penche sur les effets contradictoires du processus de précarisation sur la capacité des agentes, en particulier, de jouir de plus d'indépendance et d'égalité sur le marché du travail. Il souligne aussi les difficultés auxquelles est confronts le syndicat dans ses efforts pour résister à la déstandardisation. Through an examination of the struggle, during the 1980s, over the use by Air Canada of part‐time workers to perform customer sales and service agent work, this article aims to expand our knowledge and understanding of the casualization of women's white‐collar, service‐sector employment under economic restructuring and the role played by unions in shaping the contours of the employment relationship. The study focusses on how Air Canada's attempt to promote labour flexibility coloured contract negotiations and was pivotal in prompting agents to take strike action for the first time in their history, as well as merge their union with a more powerful and militant one. It examines the contradictory effects of the casualization process on agents' ability to achieve independence and equality in the labour market and underscores the difficulties faced by the union in resisting destandardization.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".