When Back To Work Orders Fail: Lessons From Air Canada For U.S. Labor Policy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In August 2025, 99.7% of Air Canada flight attendants agreed to strike, triggering what quickly became one of the most visible labor disputes in North America. Within hours, the government declared the strike unlawful and issued a back‑to‑work order. On paper, this should have ended the disruption. In practice, it did not. Thousands of flight attendants, organized under the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), defied the order and continued protesting. CUPE believed the process was unfair, claiming the airline refused to bargain fairly knowing the government would intervene to preserve operations. The strike paralyzed operations at Canada’s largest airline and frustrated the travel plans of hundreds of thousands. The government’s legal authority collided with overwhelming worker solidarity, resulting in a standoff that underscored the limits of ‘command‑and‑control’ labor law. The print edition of the issue has also been released. This post was originally published on the Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution website on December 10, 2025.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.012 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.055 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 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".