Air Transat flight attendants rejected for a second time an agreement in principle that had been reached with their employer regarding the renewal of their collective agreement.
Some 2,100 flight attendants, based at Montreal and Toronto airports, are affected by this negotiation. They are members of a local section of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), affiliated with the FTQ.
CUPE indicated Thursday that its members voted 81.9% against the agreement in principle reached on January 7.
And the participation rate is high, at 88.7%, specifies CUPE.
Strike mandate
At the same time, union members adopted another strike mandate, in a proportion of 94.6%. No date has yet been set for its triggering; the mandate is valid until 1er april.
These union members had already rejected a first agreement in principle which was reached at the end of last year, when a strike threat was looming for January 3. This was never triggered.
The parties returned to the negotiating table and reached this second agreement in principle, on January 7, without a strike being called.
The union now wants to return “quickly” to the negotiating table with the employer.
The dispute remains regarding remuneration for hours of work on the ground, before takeoffs and after landings. The union also wants to negotiate better clauses affecting staffing levels on board planes.
For its part, management insisted that no strike or lockout notice had been announced for the moment. She said she was ready to return to the negotiating table another time.
“We have been negotiating in good faith since the beginning of the process and included in this second agreement notable improvements to the employment contract, as well as generous and competitive salary increases. We are sorry about this second refusal. We are returning to the negotiating table and our objective remains to find common ground to the satisfaction of both parties as quickly as possible,” said Julie Lamontagne, head of human resources, communications and corporate responsibility at Transat.
The union did not want to make any comments “in order to prioritize this resumption of negotiations”.