TORONTO (AP) — An aircraft mechanics’ strike forced Canada’s second-largest airline, WestJet, to cancel hundreds of additional flights Sunday, upending the plans of nearly 110,000 passengers over the Canada Day long weekend and prompting the carrier to sue. The federal government takes action.
About 680 workers, whose daily inspections and repairs are essential to airline operations, left their jobs Friday evening despite the Labor Secretary’s directive for binding arbitration.
“WestJet is in receipt of a binding arbitration order and is awaiting urgent clarification from the government that the strike and arbitration cannot exist simultaneously; this is something they have committed to addressing and we are awaiting it like all Canadians,” WestJet Airlines President Diederic Penn said in a statement Sunday.
Since Thursday, WestJet has canceled 829 flights scheduled to fly between then and Monday — the busiest travel weekend of the season.
The vast majority of Sunday’s flights were canceled as WestJet reduced its fleet of 180 aircraft to 32 active planes and topped the global list of cancellations among major airlines over the weekend.
Trevor Temple-Murray was one of thousands of customers who rushed to rebook after their flights were canceled less than a day earlier.
“We just have to wait,” said Temple Murray, a resident of Lethbridge, Alberta, who waited in the car with his wife and 2-year-old son in the parking lot in Victoria, British Columbia. airport. They were trying to get a plane to Calgary.
Their flight was cancelled at 6:05 p.m., and they didn’t know until the evening whether the flight scheduled for 7 a.m. the next day would go ahead.
“There are a lot of angry people out there,” Temple Murray said, pointing to the station.
Nearby, Marina Ciprian, a 10th-grade exchange student, said she was supposed to return home to Spain early Sunday, but now she will not return to her family until Tuesday after experiencing three flight cancellations.
“It hurts,” she said. “I was supposed to be home today, about seven hours ago, but I didn’t.”
Both WestJet and the Fraternal Order of Aircraft Mechanics accused the other side of refusing to negotiate in good faith.
The union’s goal remains to reach an agreement through bargaining rather than through an arbitrator – a path the union has opposed from the beginning.
The union says its wage demands will cost WestJet less than C$8 million ($5.6 million) above what the company offered for the first year of the collective agreement — the first contract between the two sides. It has acknowledged that the gains will exceed compensation for its industry peers across Canada and be more on par with its U.S. counterparts.
WestJet says it offered a 12.5% pay increase in the first year of the contract, and a 23.5% compound pay increase over the rest of the 5 1/2 years.
