WestJet warns of disruptions in coming days as it recovers from mechanics strike

WestJet says there will still be flight disruptions, including cancellations, this week after a deal was reached to end a strike by its mechanics.

The airline issued a news release early Monday EDT saying it is restoring operations in a safe and timely manner, but due to the “significant impact” to its network over the past few days, “returning to business-as-usual flying will take time and further disruptions.”

“We are grateful to be recovering our operation; however, we fully recognize the continued impact on our guests and sincerely appreciate their patience and understanding,” said airline president Diederik Pen, in another news release Monday afternoon.

When the tentative agreement was announced in a late-night statement, the airline said it had cancelled around 830 flights scheduled between Thursday and Monday and had pared down its 180-plane fleet to 32 active aircraft.

It said later that an additional 214 flights were being cancelled on Monday on top of 78 that had already been chopped, and 27 flights have been cancelled for Tuesday.

Edmonton resident Dave Simmons has tickets to fly WestJet to Las Vegas with his family on Wednesday morning and is hopeful his flight, which goes through Vancouver, will arrive in time for his kids to make a show by rock band Blink-182 that evening.

He said he checked to see if the same flight took off as scheduled on Monday morning, which it did, giving him reason for optimism.

“I don’t know if that’s going to change on Wednesday,” he said, adding he’d tried booking an alternate flight with Delta on Saturday when the strike was still ongoing, but said part of that journey would have included a WestJet leg.

Some 680 members of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association, whose daily inspections and repairs are essential to airline operations, had walked off the job on Friday evening despite a directive for binding arbitration from the federal labour minister.

In its own news release, the union urged its members to return to work immediately pending a vote on the agreement.

The challenges WestJet says it now faces include the fact that its planes are parked at 13 airports across Canada, eight of which do not have crew bases, which it says means crew need to be transported to the aircraft for retrieval.

Those planes that were parked will require standard maintenance and safety checks before returning to service, it says. It also says recovering stranded crew across its network “will be an immediate priority.”

The strike disrupted the travel plans of tens of thousands of travellers over the Canada Day long weekend.

“We believe this outcome would not have been possible without the strike, but we do regret the disruption and inconvenience it has caused the traveling public over the Canada Day holiday period,” the union’s statement said.

“The timing was coincidental as the negotiation process did not follow a predictable timeline.”

Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan had mandated late last week as Friday’s strike deadline loomed that both sides undertake binding arbitration headed by the country’s labour tribunal.

The union’s negotiating committee had said that it would “comply with the minister’s order” and that it was directing its members to “refrain from any unlawful job action,” but less than 24 hours later, workers were on the picket lines.

A decision from the Canada Industrial Relations Board seemed to affirm the legality of their actions regardless of protocols around arbitration.

The union said the tentative five-year deal includes immediate pay increases, full restoration of the WestJet Savings Plan and improved benefits. It said if members ratify it, the compulsory arbitration ordered by the labour minister won’t be necessary.

Both WestJet and the union had accused the other side of refusing to negotiate in good faith.

Pen had stressed what he called the “continued reckless actions” of a union making “blatant efforts” to disrupt Canadians’ travel plans, while the association claimed in an update to members Sunday that mechanics were “the victim of WestJet’s virulent PR campaign that you are scofflaws.”

This is the second tentative agreement in the dispute.

Union members voted overwhelmingly to reject a tentative deal from WestJet in mid-June and following two weeks of tense talks between the two parties.

Before the latest deal was reached overnight, WestJet said it had offered a 12.5 per cent wage hike in the first year of the contract, and a compounded wage increase of 23 per cent over the rest of the five-and-a-half-year term.

The union had said its demands around wages would cost WestJet less than $8 million beyond what the company offered for the first year of the collective agreement — the first contract between the two sides. It has acknowledged the gains would surpass compensation for industry colleagues across Canada and sit more on par with U.S. counterparts.