An overwhelming majority of Air Canada flight attendants have voted to potentially go on strike as the crew’s union battles for higher wages and other work improvements.
The Air Canada Component of CUPE, a union representing more than 10,000 flight attendants across Air Canada and Air Canada Rouge, said on Tuesday that 99.7% of its members voted in favor of a strike action if necessary.
The union says it has been negotiating with Air Canada for months with no results over issues like unpaid work, work rules, and poverty-level wages. Currently, the airline’s flight attendants aren’t paid during certain job duties, including when performing safety checks, attending to onboard medical emergencies, and during boarding and deplaning.
It’s a longstanding practice in the airline industry that flight attendants don’t begin earning their hourly wage until after the aircraft boarding door is closed. That standard has begun to shift somewhat in recent years, with airlines like Delta, United, and American now paying cabin crew half their hourly rates during the boarding process after some of their flight attendants similarly threatened to strike in 2024. (Delta approved the new pay policy in 2022.)
Additionally, the union says that its entry-level flight attendants have only received a 10% wage increase since 2000, despite the fact that Canada’s inflation rate has swelled by 169%, and the average full-time wage in the country has jumped by 210% over the last 25 years.
While Air Canada’s flight attendants have approved a potential strike, the vote doesn’t guarantee a strike will happen. However, the vote does clear the way for a legal strike to begin as soon as August 16, the union says.
The strike vote reflects flight attendants’ ongoing frustration, according to the union. “While the airline continues to slap junk fees on flyers and gouge the public, they’re also exploiting their own employees by severely underpaying flight attendants or refusing to pay them at all for safety-critical aspects of our jobs,” said Wesley Lesosky, president of the Air Canada Component of CUPE.
For its part, Air Canada says it’s ready to continue negotiations to avoid a strike from occurring. In a statement to CBC, Air Canada said it "firmly believes that there is more than enough time to reach such an agreement and avoid disrupting the plans of hundreds of thousands of travellers." The airline continued to say that it "remains committed to the bargaining process and is eager to resume discussions, which CUPE had suspended during the vote.”
Flight attendants’ last contract, which was in place for a decade, expired in March.
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