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Passengers are looking for answers and scrambling to change travel plans after WestJet flight attendants went on strike just after midnight on Sunday, leading to hundreds of flight cancellations.
Some travellers are stranded abroad, while others have had to cancel vacations or family visits — and some tell CBC News they are out thousands of dollars.
WestJet and the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) have not said much as they’ve continued contract talks in Calgary on Sunday, during a long weekend that marks one of the year’s busiest travel times.
Adding to the chaos, some travellers say they are getting mixed messages from WestJet, if they’re able to contact the airline at all. But amid the frustration, there appears to be a strong undercurrent of support for the 4,287 flight attendants who walked off the job.
“I completely think that everything [the flight attendants] are asking for is reasonable,” said Yellowknife resident Robyn Scott, who is worried her 15-year-old could end up stranded after a family visit in Winnipeg because of flight cancellations.
More than 4,200 WestJet flight attendants are officially on strike. As CBC’s Jo Horwood reports, 600 flights have already been cancelled across the country as both sides returned to the bargaining table Sunday.
In Calgary, where the company is headquartered, passing drivers honked in support of the picketing flight attendants. Nearby, American traveller Zach Sherrard said his dad is driving up from Denver to get him home because it will be faster than the quickest available flight rebooking.
“He’ll get here sometime tomorrow, and I’ll get back sometime Tuesday. The best flight I could have gotten would have been Tuesday night with an eight-hour layover in Dallas,” he said.
Sherrard said even with the frustration, he, too, supports the flight attendants.
WestJet locked out the workers in response to the strike.
The airline said that as of 2 p.m. ET on Sunday, it had cancelled 600 flights since Friday, following the union’s 72-hour strike notice and the company’s subsequent 72-hour lockout notice.
Major airports, meanwhile, have been telling customers not to come looking for solutions in person but to continue dealing directly with WestJet if their flights have been cancelled.
Cost and confusion
Costs are racking up for some customers.
Anuj Dhawan and his family were supposed to head back to Toronto on Sunday afternoon after vacationing on the Caribbean island of St. Maarten.
Instead, after getting a 1:15 a.m. notification that their flight was cancelled, he had to scramble to find a new hotel, extend his car rental, book a separate one-way flight with a U.S. airline and try repeatedly to get in touch with WestJet — with no luck.
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“The frustration just keeps adding up,” he told CBC News Network.
Dhawan said he is “probably going to be out of pocket by anywhere between $5,000 to $6,000,” and he’s worried that the care worker looking after his mom back home won’t be able to stay an extra day.
Jada Yee, who is stranded in Calgary after flying from Regina with his wife and four kids for what was supposed to be a trip to Tokyo, is among the many Canadians who say they’ve been unable to get useful information from WestJet.
If his rebooked Monday flight is cancelled again, he said his family will have to head back to Regina and lose out on almost $8,000 paid for hotel rooms in Japan, among other costs. “We don’t know what’s going on,” Yee told CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup.
John Gradek, a faculty lecturer in aviation management at McGill University in Montreal, said WestJet flights rebooked for Monday are not going to depart, given the time it will take to get crews and planes back in the right place.
“Tomorrow’s done,” he told Cross Country Checkup, adding that even if the strike is settled on Sunday, the earliest that flights would resume would be late Tuesday afternoon.
Disagreement over work on the ground
A central sticking point of the disagreement between the two parties is WestJet’s pay model, which flight attendants say leaves them uncompensated for work they do on the ground before flights take off.
The air carrier has disputed the union’s characterization, saying its “credit hour” system combines flight time, ground duties, delays and other labour into a “single, higher rate of pay” that is then credited across the workday.
The same issue sparked a work stoppage by Air Canada flight attendants less than a year ago.
Air Canada workers ultimately won compensation increases, but not before the federal government invoked Section 107 of the Labour Code to order them back to work — an order they defied.
The federal government has so far not indicated whether it will intervene in this case, but questions loom about the possibility.
Some experts say Ottawa is likely to invoke Section 107 if the strike continues past the long weekend. But they warn that such a move could hurt workers in the long run by eroding confidence in the collective bargaining model.
Steven Tufts, a labour expert and associate professor at York University in Toronto, told CBC News he expects the government will intervene if the strike goes longer than a day or two.
Considering what was achieved with Air Canada last year, Tufts said it’s also not surprising that CUPE hit the picket lines and that Jobs Minister Patty Hajdu is in Calgary, where WestJet is based.
“The government in this sector is always in the room,” he said.
In a social media post on Sunday, Hajdu called the strike a “disappointing development” but said the government’s top mediators are working around the clock and expect the two sides to come to an agreement at the bargaining table.
