Air Canada’s flight attendants plan to remain on strike, their union has said, defying government efforts to force them back to work and into binding arbitration over a dispute that has left more than 100,000 travellers stranded around the world during the peak summer travel season.
About 10,000 flight attendants who work for Canada’s largest airline walked out on the job early on Saturday amid an increasingly bitter dispute over what the union has described as “poverty wages” and unpaid labour. Around the same time, Air Canada, which operates about 700 flights a day, said it would begin locking flight attendants out of airports. Less than 12 hours later, the Canadian government said it had ordered an end to the work stoppage, leading Air Canada to announce plans to resume flying by Sunday evening.
However, that timeline was thrown into question after the union told Reuters it would challenge the return-to-work order, which it described as unconstitutional. It was the latest twist in talks that have dragged on since March as the flight attendants seek to address the fact that they are not compensated for work carried out when planes are not in the air, whether it is time spent on the ground between flights and or helping passengers to board.
