WestJet Airlines maintenance technicians strike ahead of long weekend

By Nilutpal Timsina

(Reuters) – Aircraft maintenance technicians and other technical staff at Canadian carrier WestJet Airlines began a strike on Friday at the start of a long weekend after negotiations failed to reach agreement on salaries and working conditions.

WestJet expressed its outrage over the strike over Canada Day weekend and announced that the union would be held “100 percent responsible for the unnecessary stress and costs it caused.”

Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan had tried to avert the strike. He intervened on Thursday after WestJet began cancelling flights. He had instructed the Canadian Council of Trade and Industry to order final, binding arbitration in the dispute.

The Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA) defended the strike in a statement on Friday, saying O’Regan’s order did not contain “a limitation on workers’ fundamental right to strike,” which is guaranteed under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The union said it announced a strike on June 18 after 97 percent of its members voted against a tentative wage agreement negotiated in May, but negotiators returned to the bargaining table two days later.

That round also failed, and the union issued a second strike notice, after which workers walked off the job at 7:30 p.m. ET (11:30 p.m. GMT), AMFA said.

Calgary-based airline WestJet, which is backed by Onex Corp and competes with Air Canada, said it would cancel 150 flights on Saturday because of the strike, affecting about 20,000 passengers.

“Further outages are expected until Saturday morning if the strike is not ended or immediate action is not taken,” it said.

The airline said it is actively taking measures to minimize flight disruptions, including calling on the Canadian government to intervene immediately.

The union said the airline had informed it that it would not participate in further collective bargaining in Toronto, citing government-ordered arbitration. The airline also declined a request to continue collective bargaining in Calgary next week, the union said.

The company said its bargaining committee was ready to continue talks with the airline and resume wage negotiations over the weekend and next week.

(Reporting by Nilutpal Timsina and Aatreyee Dasgupta in Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid, William Mallard, Himani Sarkar and Tomasz Janowski)