Air Canada strike: Flight attendants vote to strike if agreement not reached - resulting in cancelled flights
Flight attendants at Air Canada have voted overwhelmingly to take part in strike action.
The flight attendants want strike action unless the airline significantly improves its offer to struggling crew members in protracted contract negotiations. On Tuesday, the CUPE union, which represents more than 10,000 flight attendants at Air Canada and its leisure subsidiary Air Canada Rouge, announced that its members had voted 99.7% in favor of strike action.
“The company would rather drag their feet than negotiate on the things that matter to our members,” slammed Wesley Lesosky, president of the Air Canada Component of CUPE. “Now, flight attendants have had a chance to weigh in and tell the company it’s time to get serious about negotiating.”
Flight attendants are particularly frustrated at the amount of unpaid work they have to do, which includes completing safety checks, getting the aircraft cabin ready, boarding, and deplaning. The union has demanded that Air Canada start paying flight attendants from the moment they start work, rather than the traditional method of basing pay on ‘block hours’, which is calculated from the time that the plane pushes back from the gate to the time it arrives at its destination.
Air Canada has, so far, refused to entertain the idea of introducing ‘boarding pay’, which is slowly being adopted at other North American airlines, including Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, and Delta. CUPE argues that this refusal is entrenching the gender pay gap amongst flight attendants, as the majority of crew members are female.
Unlike in the United States, the threat of Air Canada flight attendants actually going on strike is very real. Once a strike is approved, flight attendants don’t need to seek permission from a third party to take part in a walkout, although there are minimum notice periods.
Based on the current state of play between Air Canada and the union, flight attendants could legally go on strike from August 16. The airline has yet to publish details of how it would deal with a flight attendant walkout.