Negotiations between flight attendants and Air Transat are being closely monitored by other players in a Canadian airline industry plunged “in a context of demands” post-pandemic.
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The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), which represents Air Transat flight attendants, also announced a second agreement in principle with the employer on Sunday evening. The first attempt at an agreement was massively rejected by members after the holidays.
“We are in a context of demands in this sector which has regained momentum a little,” explains the director of the International Observatory of Aeronautics and Civil Aviation at UQAM, Mehran Ebrahimi. “Everyone suffered a lot during the pandemic and the recovery happened so quickly that it surprised a lot of people.”
As airlines return to full flights and profits, several pilot and flight attendant unions see their employment contracts on the verge of being renegotiated.
Mehran Ebrahimi is director of the International Aeronautics and Civil Aviation Observatory at UQAM.
Photo taken from the UQAM website
“People are starting to demand that after the sacrifices, it is time to share the income,” summarizes Mr. Ebrahimi.
Thus, the ongoing negotiations among Air Transat flight attendants could quickly snowball with other airlines.
“We are in this position that I would say is unenviable, being the first. People are watching us, trying to find out what we want to have,” says an Air Transat flight attendant with whom The newspaper spoke and who requested anonymity because she was not authorized to speak about the negotiations.
The issue of unpaid work
According to this flight attendant, an increase in remuneration is one of the main demands.
“With the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been salary freezes, so for three years flight attendants have become enormously poorer,” she explains.
The notion of unpaid work is also put forward by the union. Generally, flight attendants only start getting paid when the plane is in flight.
“If we make a round trip to Cancun for example, we don’t get paid for the time between the two flights. It can be around 1h30,” illustrates the flight attendant.
One of his colleagues also interviewed by The newspaper adds that the current employment contract with Air Transat dates from 2015 and that it had simply been extended since then.
This other flight attendant argues that “on-call” schedules do not offer the flexibility to take on a second backup job.
If the first rejected agreement “did not meet at all” the expectations of union members, this second draft arouses “febrileness”.
“The union told us that it understood our requests, so we hope to have something that suits everyone, or at least the majority,” he says.