Air Canada flight attendants and members from other unions held a protest in front of the airline’s Montreal headquarters on Sunday, the day they were supposed to go back to work. With chants of, “We won’t fly!” Air Canada flight attendants are defying the back-to-work order put in place by the federal government on Aug. 16. They were ordered binding arbitration to end the work stoppage. “Air Canada was pretty quick to try to ask the workers and fly attendants to come back to work,” said labour relations expert Marc Ranger. The airline had wanted their in-flight employees to report for duty at 2 p.m. The flight attendants were already at Trudeau International Airport in Montreal, but not in uniform: they were outside loudly protesting the forced arbitration. “We won’t let those people work without any pay anymore. So yeah, we need to fix that. And we were going to take all the measures that we could use for supporting those flight attendants,” said Patrick Loutney, president of CUPE Quebec. At the same time , Air Canada announced that it was suspending its plan to resume limited flights. CUPE said in a statement that members would remain on strike and invited Air Canada back to the table to “negotiate a fair deal.” “This conflict with Air Canada, with their flight attendants, for me and for the unions, is [of] huge importance for the future of labour relations in Canada,” said Ranger. “That fight is not just CUPE members, it’s for all the unionists, all the unions in Canada,” added Loutney. CUPE said it will be challenging the order that they argue violates the charter rights of 10,000 flight attendants, 70 per cent of whom are women. The airline says it plans to resume flights as of the evening of Aug. 18. Get Monday’s latest updates here.
