What a Canadian Strike Teaches Malaysian Businesses About Disruption
Imagine this: your biggest client is flying in from Penang to sign a deal. Your Malaysian supplier is on a flight to Kuching for a critical factory audit. Your export shipment is sitting on the tarmac, waiting for a connecting flight to Singapore. Now imagine all of that disappearing in a single afternoon.
That’s exactly what happened in Canada over the August long weekend. More than 4,000 flight attendants at WestJet, the country’s second-largest airline, went on strike, grounding about 600 daily flights and disrupting travel plans for an estimated 250,000 passengers. The timing could not have been worse — it was one of the busiest travel weekends of the year because of a civic holiday. Publicly, the airline said it was disappointed. The union said it had been trying to get its concerns addressed for almost 11 months of bargaining.
You might be thinking: “That’s Canada. My business is in Malaysia. Why should I care?” Because the same kind of disruption can happen to you. It might not be an airline strike. It could be a port shutdown, a power outage, a key employee resigning overnight, or a supplier failing to deliver. Your business runs on assumptions — that flights will take off, that shipments will arrive, that people will show up. When those assumptions break, your small business gets hit hardest.
TL;DR: A WestJet strike grounded ~600 daily flights and stranded an estimated 250,000 passengers in Canada. The disruption wasn’t just an airline problem — local businesses lost customers, travel plans collapsed, and supply chains stalled. For Malaysian SMEs, the takeaway is simple: identify your dependencies, prepare backup plans, and make sure you’re not a single point of failure.
What This Means
A strike is a collective action by workers to stop operations until their demands are met. In this case, the conflict was over pay for work performed on the ground before and after flights. Delta Air Lines became the first carrier to introduce pay for ground work back in 2022, and Air Canada followed in February. The WestJet flight attendants wanted the same recognition.
The result was immediate and visible: about 600 daily flights grounded, and hundreds of thousands of passengers left scrambling. The Canadian federal jobs minister publicly expressed disappointment that negotiation failed. The airline said affected passengers would receive refunds — but a refund doesn’t fix a missed meeting with a client or a delayed shipment of components.
What this illustrates is not really about airlines. It’s about how quickly your business’s essential ecosystem can break. When a large company is disrupted, the ripple effect reaches small businesses in ways no one foresaw.
How This Applies to Malaysian SMEs
Malaysian business owners depend on flights every week. Whether you’re flying yourself to meet a client, having an overseas buyer fly in to inspect your products, or waiting for spare parts from KL to reach your factory in Johor, you rely on transport networks that you don’t control. If Malaysia’s major airlines faced a similar labour dispute, your schedule would collapse too. The lesson is to treat every flight as a potential failure point — and have a plan B that doesn’t require a last-minute booking.
But there’s a second angle: your own workforce. You might not have a union representing your 10 or 50 employees, but you can still face an “unofficial strike” — a key staff member leaving without notice, a technician refusing to do overtime, or a salesperson feeling underappreciated and coasting. In a small team, each person is like a critical flight attendant. If one of them checks out, your operations are grounded. The WestJet dispute started with a simple grievance: people doing work they weren’t being compensated for. That’s a feeling that builds up in any workplace, including yours.
Third, look at the community impact. The WestJet CEO said the strike affects “the communities and businesses we serve.” He’s right. The restaurants, hotels, and transport services around Pearson Airport lost customers as thousands of travellers were stranded. In Malaysia, if a strike or disruption happens at KLIA, Sepang, or even a major LRT line, nearby businesses and dependent industries feel it. Your business may not be in the travel industry at all, but your customers could be. If your market is disrupted, you’re disrupted.
Practical Takeaways
Here’s what you can do this week to make your business more resilient, without waiting for a crisis to force you.
- List your critical dependencies. Flights, shipping, electricity, internet, payment gateways, and key employees. Write down which ones would stop your business if they disappeared for 48 hours.
- Build a travel backup plan. If a flight is cancelled, can you do a video meeting instead? Do you know the refund and rebooking policies before you book? Do you have contacts at more than one airline or logistics provider?
- Cross-train your team. Can someone else run payroll, access your customer database, or answer key client emails if your operations person is out? Document the basics now, not during a storm.
- Review how you treat “ground work.” Are you compensating employees for the extra work they do before and after official hours? The WestJet dispute was about exactly that. Paying attention here can prevent a bigger problem later.
- Tell your clients early. If you see a disruption coming, communicate before it affects them. A short honest email builds more trust than a silent delay.
Every business is vulnerable to a disruption it can’t control. The only thing you can control is how prepared you are for it.
The Numbers Behind the Disruption
| Data Point | Figure |
|---|---|
| Flight attendants on strike | 4,000+ |
| Daily flights grounded | ~600 |
| Passengers affected | ~250,000 |
| Months of bargaining before strike | ~11 months |
| First airline to pay for ground work | Delta Air Lines, 2022 |
All figures from the Bernama report.
The Bigger Picture
This strike is not a one-off event. Labour disputes, weather emergencies, geopolitical tensions, and technology failures are all becoming more common in a hyper-connected world. When a decision made in one country can affect a customer order in Shah Alam, small businesses can’t afford to ignore global news.
The long-term trend is that resilience will matter more than efficiency. The businesses that survive will not be the leanest — they’ll be the ones that can adapt when a supplier fails, a key employee leaves, or a transport system shuts down. That means keeping a little buffer in your schedule, maintaining relationships with multiple suppliers, and building a culture where people feel heard before they feel desperate.
You don’t need to solve every possible crisis today. But you can ask yourself one honest question: If your version of “WestJet” went on strike tomorrow — whether that’s an airline, a shipping company, or your most important employee — would you still be able to serve your customers? If the answer is “no,” start building the answer that starts with “yes.”
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