After months Negotiations full of twists and turnsAir Transat's 2,100 flight attendants have agreed to a new collective agreement that runs until October 31, 2027.
The agreement was approved by 62.7% of unionized workers. Around 78% of them took part in the vote, which took place between February 19th and 22nd.
“It’s a big victory for our members,” said Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) spokesperson at the negotiating table, Chantal Bourgeois. It wasn’t an easy negotiation, but we were able to achieve interesting gains.”
The union sought a significant pay catch-up after “years of concessions” from workers in Toronto and Montreal to allow the Quebec company to weather the pandemic.
Therefore, excluding the 18 percent compensation for 2022 and 2023, Air Transat employees will receive a 3 percent increase each year until the end of the new agreement.
“Few positive points”
If the Air Transat component of CUPE says it is happy with this new contract, the same cannot be said of the flight attendants who felt “pushed to the wall” when the union decided to present them with the arbitrators' proposal and thus exclude such a strike threat.
“It is practically the same as the second agreement that was rejected. “I think there were several of us who wanted to go all the way, there was a good mobilization,” laments a unionized employee.
“We had two options: accept [l’entente proposée par les conciliatrices] or go to arbitration,” summarizes another flight attendant interviewed by Le Journal. “For the few gains we would have had in arbitration regarding this agreement, we may have lost more if we had waited.”
The members surveyed agree that the new agreement contains “few positive points”.
Chantal Bourgeois claims that since the fundamental rejection of a second agreement, the negotiations have become more concrete, especially at the financial level.
“We had to adapt the strategy. We called for the intervention of mediators and agreed to live with the decision of a third person,” concludes the union consultant.
– In collaboration with Jean-Philippe Guilbault
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