Canada’s second largest airline, WestJet, has cancelled 829 flights from Thursday, June 27 to Monday, July 1, which is also considered to be the busiest travel weekend of the season. The reason for this is a strike by 680 workers who are engaged in the daily inspections and repair tasks for the airline. However, as per the recent development, the union representing WestJet Airlines’ striking mechanics has negotiated a contract with the carrier, ending their strike immediately on Monday, July 1.
Out of the 829 flights cancelled, 410 flights, almost 50 per cent of the total, were cancelled alone on Sunday.
Thousands of people affected
The cancellation of hundreds of flights has the tendency to affect the lives of thousands of people, resulting in the cancellation of business meetings, holidays and what not. Not only this, but it has definitely impacted the business numbers of the airline along with the workers’ day-to-day life. Reportedly, the flight cancellation has affected the plans of roughly 110,000 travellers over the Canada Day long weekend and prompted the carrier to demand action from the federal government.
Among the many commuters, Trevor Temple-Murray, who waited in a car with his wife and a two-year-old son in the parking area of Victoria, British Columbia, airport, had to reschedule their flight with less than a day’s notice. Temple-Murray said that we’ll just have to wait it out as we were trying to get a plane to Calgary. Their 6:05 p.m. flight had been cancelled, and they wouldn’t know until the evening whether a scheduled 7 a.m. flight the next day would go ahead or not. “There are a lot of angry people in there,” Temple-Murray said, pointing at the terminal.
Another flyer, a grade 10 exchange student, Marina Cebrian, said she was supposed to be back home in Spain early Sunday, but now won’t return to her family until Tuesday after enduring three flight cancellations.
Why was WestJet employees on strike?
The workers who are responsible for daily inspections and repairs of the airline operations, walked off the job Friday evening for a wage hike despite a directive for binding arbitration from the labour minister.
WestJet Airlines President, Diederik Pen, in a statement on Sunday said that the airline is in receipt of a binding arbitration order and awaits urgent clarity from the government that a strike and arbitration cannot exist simultaneously. “This is something they have committed to address and like all Canadians we are waiting,” Pen added.
The union’s objective with this strike is to reach an agreement through negotiation rather than arbitration, which is a path it has always rejected. According to the union, WestJet would lose less than $8 million Canadian (US$5.6 million) as a result of its salary expectations compared to what the corporation has provided for the first year of the collective agreement, which is the first contract between the two companies. It has admitted that the benefits would be higher than the pay of industry colleagues in Canada and more in line with those in the United States. To this, WestJet says that it has offered a 12.5 per cent wage hike in the first year of the contract, and a compounded wage increase of 23.5 per cent over the rest of the 5.5 year term.
Is the airline back on runway?
The airline has today, July 1, negotiated a contract in order to end the strike with immediate effect while the union said that the deal covers the next five years but without any further details on the new pay deal.
Westjet has said that the members would return to work to restore the network after the airline had to park 130 aircraft at 13 airports across Canada. It is anticipated that the airline will have further disruptions over the coming week as it gets aircraft and crew back into position.
“WestJet & AMFA have reached a tentative agreement, Canadians patience having been worn too thin,” Canadian Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan said in a post on X. The minister had urged the union and the airline to resolve their differences and reach an agreement.
(with inputs from agency)