By Associated Press’s ROB GILLIES
AP (Toronto) If the union that represents the nation’s largest airline’s flight attendants and the airline cannot come to an agreement by early Saturday, Air Canada will shut down entirely.
Around 1 a.m. EST on Saturday, almost 10,000 flight attendants are scheduled to leave their jobs, and the business will then enforce a lockout. Every day, it poses a threat to roughly 130,000 travelers.
Prior to the deadline, the Canadian airline stated that it anticipates canceling 500 flights by Friday evening. In anticipation of a lengthy work stoppage that would affect hundreds of thousands of passengers, it began canceling flights on Thursday.
A complete grounding might leave almost 25,000 Canadians trapped overseas every day.
We implore the parties to cooperate with federal mediators in order to reach a consensus. Federal Jobs Minister Patty Hajdu said in a statement Friday that time is valuable and that Canadians are depending on you.
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According to aviation analytics company Cirium, Air Canada has canceled 176 international and 87 domestic flights that were supposed to depart on Friday and Saturday by midday Friday. Four foreign flights and eighteen domestic flights were canceled on Thursday, the day the airline said it was starting to scale down most of its operations.
The flight attendants’ representative, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, or CUPE, declined to willingly participate in arbitration. According to a statement, Air Canada should go back to the negotiating table and start doing good faith negotiations.
Contract negotiations have stalled due to disagreements between the union, which represents over 10,000 Air Canada flight attendants, and the airline on important topics, like as pay increases.
It’s unclear how long the planes will be grounded.
The decision to lock out the union members, even if it meant stopping flights, will assist promote an orderly resumption, which should take a full week at the best, according to Air Canada Chief Operating Officer Mark Nasr.
After over eight months of contract negotiations, Air Canada and CUPE have not yet reached a provisional agreement.
At the end of July, the union held a ballot, and 99.7% of members agreed to go on strike. It issued a 72-hour strike notice to Air Canada on Wednesday. In response, the airline issued a “lockout notice,” stating that it would not allow flight attendants to work on Saturday.
The union stated that it would rather negotiate an agreement that its members can then vote on, and that it rejected the airline’s offer to enter a binding arbitration procedure that would have stopped flight attendants from quitting their jobs.
