Weary travellers at YYC despite fed intervention in Air Canada labour fight

Yahoo

2 days ago

It was a subdued Saturday morning by the Air Canada counters at the Calgary International Airport.
Travellers stood wearily in lines by the counter, baggage in tow while staff ran back-and-forth between the counters with passports in hand.
Some had been at the airport for hours, waiting to hear back on cancelled flights and rebooking alternatives.
'We've been here since seven this morning,' Clem Lacoume said. She had travelled to Canada from France with a friend, Emma Sambras, two weeks ago to explore British Columbia and had a flight scheduled home on Saturday.
At 12:58 a.m. ET on Saturday, 10,000 Air Canada flight attendants walked off the job on strike, after the airline and the union representing them failed to reach a deal ahead of the deadline. The airline estimated 130,000 customers would be affected for each day of the strike.
Patty Hajdu, the federal jobs minister, directed the Canada Industrial Relations Board on Saturday morning to order flight attendants back to work, impose final and binding arbitration and extend the terms of the parties' existing contract until a new one one is determined.
However, with several flights already cancelled and travellers urgently attempting to rebook alternatives, it will still take time until flights are back to scheduled routine, according to Adam Danyleko, CEO of Elite Travel Management, a Calgary-based travel agency.
'It takes a while for the routes to get back online,' he said. 'They've already cancelled them so they've got to do a lot of work with the actual individual airport locations to bring the routes back online and to bring the flight attendants back online.'
On Saturday morning, more than 100 flight attendants banded at the far end of the airport building, near the departure doors leading to the counters for the U.S. airlines.
'Our members are ready for this,' Brittany Thomas, local vice-president for CUPE Local 495 in Calgary. 'They didn't want it to get to this but they are here because they have to be here.
'There's a lot of community,' she added. 'We have a very strong engagement because we know each other, we're friends, we're tight-knit.'
The days leading up to the strike held a lot of 'anxiety and stress,' she said. The last time the airline's flight attendants went on strike was in 1985.
Daylen Mitansky, local vice-president of CUPE Local 495, said when he heard the strike was to be official, he cried. 'It's really heartbreaking,' he said. 'We're all sad about the passengers being stranded and it's really hard on a lot of us.
'We never thought it would get like this. We never thought we would be walking the line.'
Employees feel a combination of 'hurt and confusion' towards a company which expressed intentions to lock them out 30 minutes after the strike went into effect on Saturday morning.
'And also just disgruntled because of the lies that they've been saying of our union at the bargaining table,' Mitansky said. 'They're not ignoring the company. They want this dealt with.'
Key issues at the negotiating table include wages and unpaid work. The airline said it offered a 38 per cent increase in total compensation over four years with a 25 per cent raise in the first year. However, the union rejected the offer, describing it as below inflation, below market value and below minimum wage, and would still leave flight attendants unpaid for hours of work when the plane isn't moving.
According to Thomas, the starting wage at the company is $1,952 per month.
'They have had record profits,' she said. 'There is no reason why they cannot make a change.'
Karen Smith, who owns Boulevard Travel, said her agents had been working overtime in the days leading up to the strike to rebook clients.
'They are totally exhausted,' she said. 'And we don't get reimbursed for our time.'
The challenges have been finding seats on airlines to rebook clients and then, having to do so at significantly higher prices.
'I had a team of under-18 years travelling home,' she said. 'They paid $500 for a flight home and they're young kids, they have to get home.
'We've had to charter a flight, which we don't make a penny on, because we don't want to make money on people paying for this. They're now paying $2,200 to get home.'
'It is such a bad scenario,' she said.
Danyleko said his team has faced challenges with rebooking for business clients who rely on last-minute flights to be able to travel. 'Last-minute travel is already incredibly expensive,' he said. 'And now the options aren't available.'
It adds more fluctuation to an already volatile oligopoly in Canada, wherein labour disruptions in either WestJet, Air Canada or Porter — the three reigning airlines in Canada's domestic industry — can leave the economy shaken.
'There are just so many impacts, whether it be weather, strikes or other factors,' Danyleko said.
And it can 'make people more hesitant to travel,' Smith said, 'when you don't know what these airlines are going to do.'
'We got people going on non-refundable cruises and they're not going to get there. If you're over in Barcelona and you want to come home and there's nothing available for four days, you're going to pay triple the price you already paid for, plus multiple nights accommodation, plus missing work if you're still working,' Smith said. 'It's a disaster.'
At 11 a.m. on Saturday, Emma and Josef Gorospe sat by an Air Canada counter with a friend whom they were visiting in Calgary. The night before, they had received boarding passes for their Saturday flight, leading them to believe their flight was scheduled and confirmed to go. However, the morning they arrived to the airport, they received news their flight was cancelled.
'It's frustrating,' Emma Grosope said. Their only option was to apply for an ESTA visa and use the visa to book a connecting flight back to the U.K. via the U.S.
An Air Canada staff member had been assisting them, Grosope said, but they remained uncertain on their next steps. Missing their flight also means missing on commitments scheduled back home — a medication refill, doctor's appointments and others.
Kate Peters and Fabien Naneix said they were prepared when they received the news about their flight on Friday. 'We got ourselves organized,' Naneix said, by extending their stay at the airport hotel and calling up their respective workplaces to let them know about the delay.
'We can work from home so we are quite flexible,' Peters said. They were able to get another flight rebooked for Tuesday, but that means more costs incurred on a longer hotel stay. 'We have travel insurance,' Peters added.
Lacoume and Sambras, waiting in line, were tired. It had been hours of waiting to be rebooked on a new flight with a staff member attempting to find seats available on already booked airlines.
'I told my friend I think I lost 10 years of my life in the stress over the past two days,' she said. She added she was supposed to land in Paris by Sunday and board a train hours later to meet her parents and family in the south of France.
'It doesn't just impact us, but also our families and friends,' she said.
'We feel useless and just very powerless,' Sambras said.
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By the end of the fifth hour spent waiting in the airport, the two were finally booked on flights on Monday. Their new schedules would see them connect through Reykjavik and land in Paris by Tuesday.
'At least it's something,' Lacoume said. 'We now have a way to go home.'
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