Union says Air Canada flight attendants won’t return to work despite strike being declared illegal
Union says Air Canada flight attendants won’t return to work despite strike being declared illegal
TORONTO (AP) — The union for 10,000 striking Air Canada flight attendants said Monday they won’t return to work even though the strike, now in its third day, has been declared illegal. The strike is affecting about 130,000 travelers a day at the peak of the summer travel season, and the two sides remain far apart on pay and other issues.
Air Canada said rolling cancelations now extend to Tuesday afternoon after the union defied a second return-to-work order. The country’s biggest airline had said earlier that operations would resume on Monday evening but the union president said that won’t happen.
“We will not be returning to the skies,” said Mark Hancock, national president for Canadian Union of Public Employees, or CUPE, which also represents some non-public sectors.
Defying a second return to work order
The Canada Industrial Relations Board had declared the strike illegal earlier on Monday and ordered the striking flight attendants back on the job. But the union said it will defy this second return to work order, after an earlier one had been ignored. That one also ordered the union to submit to arbitration.
The board, an independent administrative tribunal that interprets and applies Canada’s labor laws, had said the union needed to provide written notice to all of its members by noon Monday that they must resume their duties.
“If it means folks like me going to jail than so be it. If it means our union being fined than so be it,” Hancock said, “We’re looking for a solution here. Our members want a solution here but solution has to be found at the bargaining table.”
It was not immediately clear what recourse the board or the government have if the union continues to refuse.
Labor leaders are objecting to the government’s repeated use of a law that cuts off workers right to strike and force them into arbitration, as the government has already done in recent years with workers at ports, railways and elsewhere.
“We are in a situation where literally hundreds of thousands of Canadians and visitors to our country are being disrupted by this action,” Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney said. “I urge both parties to resolve this as quickly as possible.”
Carney said that it was disappointing that the talks have not led to a deal and stressed it was important that flight attendants are compensated fairly at all times.
The labor board previously ordered airline staff back to work by 2 p.m. Sunday and for the union to enter arbitration, after the government intervened. Air Canada then said it planned to resume flights Sunday evening. But when the workers refused, the airline said it would resume flights Monday evening instead. However, there was no sign CUPE would relent.
Air Canada operates around 700 flights per day. The airline estimates 50,000 customers will be disrupted.
Aviation analytics firm Cirium said that as of Monday afternoon, Air Canada had called off at least 1,219 domestic flights and 1,339 international flights since last Thursday, when the carrier began gradually suspending its operations ahead of the strike and lockout.
Air Canada chief executive Michael Rousseau said he’s still looking for a quick resolution.
“We’re obviously hoping we can go tomorrow, but we’ll make that decision later today,” Rousseau said on BNN Bloomberg shortly after the union announced it would continue with the strike.
Disrupted tourists, stranded passengers
Montreal resident Robert Brzymowski has been stranded in Prague along with his wife and their two children since Saturday, when Air Canada cancelled their flight home from what was meant to be a two-week vacation visiting relatives.
Brzymowski, who consults businesses on energy-efficient practices, said he was set to start a new job Monday but lost out on the contract because he wasn’t back in Montreal in time.
“I wasn’t planning on losing my job over vacation,” he said. “It’s just not right. The worst thing is the amount of anxiety it’s caused.”
Frustrated by what he described as a lack of communication from the airline, Brzymowski said he went to the airport in Prague on Monday morning in search of answers. He was able to get the airline to book them a new flight on Aug. 25 — more than a week after their original flight.
His children will also miss the first day of the new school year, and his wife won’t get paid for the week because she used the last of her paid time off for the year for this trip.
“I, for one, will never fly Air Canada again,” Brzymowski said. “I’ll take a boat if I have to.”
Talks going back 8 months
Flight attendants walked off the job around 1 a.m. EDT on Saturday, after turning down the airline’s request to enter into government-directed arbitration, which allows a third-party mediator to decide the terms of a new contract.
Air Canada and CUPE have been in contract talks for about eight months, but remain far apart on the issue of pay and the unpaid work that flight attendants do when planes aren’t in the air.
The airline’s latest offer included a 38% increase in total compensation, including benefits and pensions, over four years, that it said “would have made our flight attendants the best compensated in Canada.”
But the union pushed back, saying the proposed 8% raise in the first year didn’t go far enough because of inflation.
Passengers whose flights are impacted will be eligible to request a full refund on the airline’s website or mobile app, according to Air Canada.
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Airlines reporter Rio Yamat contributed to this report from Las Vegas.
By ROB GILLIES
Associated Press
