Air Canada flight attendants on Tuesday said they had reached a ‘tentative’ deal with the airline to end a strike over wages and ground work that has cancelled travel for half a million people worldwide.
Roughly 10,000 flight attendants walked off the job after midnight Saturday, insisting Air Canada had failed to address their demands for higher pay and compensation for unpaid ground work, including during boarding.
The attendants’ union defied two orders from a regulatory tribunal to return to work, forcing Air Canada to roll back plans to partially restore service.
But after resuming talks on Monday evening, the union said it had reached a potential deal with the airline that it would put to its members for consideration.
‘The strike has ended. We have a tentative agreement we will bring forward to you,’ the Canadian Union of Public Employees’ (CUPE) Air Canada branch said in a statement.
‘We are required to advise our membership that we must fully cooperate with resumption of operations,’ the statement said.
Air Canada said in a statement that it would ‘gradually restart its operations’ after reaching an agreement with CUPE through a mediator, William Kaplan.
It said the first flights were scheduled for Tuesday evening but warned that full service may not return for seven to 10 days.
‘Restarting a major carrier like Air Canada is a complex undertaking. Full restoration may require a week or more,’ Air Canada president Michael Rousseau said.
Neither the union nor the airline immediately provided details of the proposed agreement.
But CUPE said the deal achieves ‘transformational change for our industry after a historic fight.’
‘Unpaid work is over,’ it added, a reference to a key demand throughout the talks that flight attendants also be compensated for time not spent in the air.
‘When our rights were taken away, we stood strong, we fought back -- and we secured a tentative agreement that our members can vote on,’ CUPE further said.
Air Canada said it would not comment on the terms of the deal ‘until the ratification process is complete.’
It was not immediately clear when CUPE would schedule a vote.
- More travel disruption -
Air Canada -- the national carrier which flies directly to 180 cities domestically and abroad -- has said the strike forced cancellations impacting 500,000 people.
Over the weekend, federal labor minister Patty Hajdu invoked a legal provision to halt the strike and force both sides into binding arbitration.
Following that intervention, the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB), a regulatory tribunal, ordered the flight attendants back to work in two separate orders -- on Sunday and Monday.
But the union said it would not comply with the orders, forcing Air Canada to walk back service resumption plans.
Air Canada told customers on Tuesday to expect continued disruption ‘as aircraft and crew are out of position.’
It urged passengers to only travel to the airport if their flight was shown as operating.
‘The suspension of our service is extremely difficult for our customers. We deeply regret and apologize for the impact on them of this labour disruption,’ Rousseau said.
Prime minister Mark Carney told reporters Monday it was ‘disappointing’ that eight months of negotiations between the carrier and union had not produced an agreement.
He said it was ‘important’ that flight attendants were ‘compensated equitably,’ but voiced unease that hundreds of thousands of people were facing travel uncertainty.