A stranded passenger at the Toronto Pearson International Airport. Air Canada says a return to normal operations will take about a week.Wa Lone/Reuters
Air Canada AC-T is set to resume flying Tuesday after reaching a tentative labour agreement early this morning with the union that represents its 10,000 flight attendants, who have been on strike since Aug. 16.
“The strike has ended,” Canadian Union of Public Employees said in a statement posted to social media. “We have a tentative agreement to bring forward to you.”
Mark Nasr, Air Canada’s chief operating officer, declined to provide details of the deal but said it makes the flight attendants the best paid in Canada, with “industry leading” pay for the work they do pre- and post-flight.
“We were committed at the outset to providing Canadian industry-leading compensation for our flight attendants,” Mr. Nasr said in an interview. “The deal does exactly that.”
Mr. Nasr said 15- to 20-per-cent of Air Canada’s 700 daily flights will restart beginning at 4 p.m. ET Tuesday on the mainline and discount wing Rouge. A return to normal operations will take a week to 10 days.
“Because we were shut down for so long, it makes the restart incrementally more difficult,” Mr. Nasr said.
“There’s several thousands of passengers that are abroad, and we’re fully focused on getting them home.”
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Air Canada flies about 250 planes to more than 200 destinations. Most of its fleet was returned to domestic airports in recent days, and must undergo engine and safety checks before flying.
Mr. Nasr used the example of a flight to Sydney, Australia, from Vancouver, which takes 17 hours and leaves Tuesday night.
Because of the strike, there are no crews for a return flight in Sydney, so the one crew has to rest there for 24 hours before it can fly back to Vancouver. This amounts to a three-day process, one that has to be repeated for much of the airline’s network.
Cabin crews walked off the job early Saturday morning, grounding Canada’s largest airline, cancelling about 700 flights a day and stranding passengers around the world. The two sides had hit an impasse over wages and pay for work they do when the plane is not moving.
Hugh Pouliot, a spokesman for CUPE, said, “They will have the best ground duty provisions in North America – by a long shot – and it’s because they went on strike and the company was forced to significantly up their offer.”
Details of the tentative agreement, which must be approved by a majority of union members’ votes, were not immediately available.
“The suspension of our service is extremely difficult for our customers,” Michael Rousseau, chief executive officer of Air Canada, in a statement.
“We deeply regret and apologize for the impact on them of this labour disruption. Our priority now is to get them moving as quickly as possible.”
The tentative deal was announced after the two sides returned to the negotiating table on Monday night with the aid of William Kaplan, a respected mediator.
The same day the strike began, Patty Hajdu, Minister of Jobs and Families, directed the Canadian Industrial Relations Board to order the cabin crews to return to work and that agreement be decided by an arbitrator. The union said it was a violation of the right to strike, and refused to return to work.
On Monday, the CIRB declared the strike illegal and issued another order to end it. This, too, was defied by the union.
“If it means folks like me are going to jail, so be it,” Mark Hancock, CUPE national president, said on Monday.
Aviation data company Cirium said more than 3,000 Air Canada flights were cancelled in the labour dispute, including routes that were scrubbed in the days leading up to the strike.
Bargaining began about eight months ago to replace a labour agreement that had been in place for 10 years.
The union was seeking pay increases amid the inflation crisis. They also demanded to be paid for pre-flight duties. Cabin crews were not paid until the plane door was closed, a common industry practice.
“Unpaid work is over,” CUPE said in a statement on Tuesday, without providing details.
Air Canada said last week it had offered the union a 38-per-cent increase in compensation over four years, including hourly raises of 12 per cent to 16 per cent in the first year. This included a new formula for preflight duties.
Air Canada said its offer would mean senior employees would make an average of $87,000 a year.
Under the lapsed contract, Air Canada’s flight attendants were paid about $33 an hour in their first year. Rouge cabin crews started at about $26 an hour.
Air Canada’s pilots last year approved a contract that provides 42-per-cent raises over four years.
With files from Vanmala Subramaniam