Air Canada Reaches Deal With Flight Attendants’ Union To End Strike

TORONTO (AP) — The union for Air Canada’s 10,000 flight attendants said early Tuesday that it has reached a tentative agreement to end a strike.

Air Canada and the union resumed talks late Monday for the first time since the strike began over the weekend. The strike is affecting about 130,000 travelers a day at the peak of the summer travel season.

The union said the agreement will guarantee members pay for work performed while planes are on the ground, resolving one of the major issues that drove the strike.

“Unpaid work is over. We have reclaimed our voice and our power,” the union said in a statement. “When our rights were taken away, we stood strong, we fought back — and we secured a tentative agreement that our members can vote on.”

It followed the union’s declaration that the flight attendants wouldn’t return to work even though the strike was declared illegal.

Earlier, Air Canada said rolling cancellations would now extend through Tuesday afternoon after the union defied a second return-to-work order.

The Canada Industrial Relations Board had declared the strike illegal Monday and ordered the flight attendants back on the job. But the union said it would defy the directive. Union leaders also ignored a weekend order to submit to binding arbitration and end the strike by Sunday afternoon.

The board is an independent administrative tribunal that interprets and applies Canada’s labor laws. The government ordered the board to intervene.

Labor leaders objected to the Canadian government’s repeated use of a law that cuts off workers’ right to strike and forces them into arbitration, a step the government took in recent years with workers at ports, railways and elsewhere.

Air Canada operates around 700 flights per day. The airline estimated Monday that 500,000 customers would be affected by flight cancellations.

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.

Flight attendants walked off the job early 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.