More than ten thousand Air Canada flight attendants could soon be on strike if a deal isn’t reached by August 16.
In one of the strongest strike mandate votes in recent Canadian history, 99.7 percent of members in the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) airline division opted to authorize a strike, with a turnout of 94.6 percent. With this overwhelming strike authorization in hand, the union is now headed back to the bargaining table to make one last push for a deal before picket lines go up.
Flight attendants at Air Canada and its “leisure airline,” Air Canada Rouge, are fighting for an end to unpaid work and poverty wages at the country’s largest airline. Despite months of negotiations, Air Canada has yet to make meaningful movement on these union priorities. Flight attendants are clearly fed up.
Workers have already waited an extraordinary length of time for change. Their most recent contract, which expired last year, had been in place for a full ten years — including during the pandemic, when the airline received huge government subsidies while flight attendants faced a range of hardships.
Since the beginning of this year, CUPE and Air Canada have been in an especially protracted round of negotiations. After failing to renegotiate the ten-year expired collective agreement, in mid-May, the union filed for conciliation with the federal minister of labor, citing a bargaining impasse.
As a top issue, CUPE is seeking to address the inordinate amount of unpaid work performed by its flight attendant members. Workers are paid only when planes are in the air and frequently receive no compensation for vital work, such as performing safety checks, attending to onboard medical and safety emergencies, and assisting passengers during boarding and deplaning.
For over two years, CUPE flight attendants across multiple airlines have been engaged in a campaign to raise awareness about unpaid work. In April 2023, for example, they held a…
Auteur: Adam D. K. King
