By Allison Lampert
MONTREAL (Reuters) -Air Canada and the union representing 10,000 striking flight attendants will hold discussions on Monday night with a mediator, the union said in a statement.
The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), which represents the flight attendants, had remained on strike even after the Canada Industrial Relations Board declared its action unlawful.
Air Canada’s unionized flight attendants walked off the job on Saturday after contract talks with the carrier failed, in a move that disrupted travel plans for hundreds of thousands of passengers.
The union is currently in meetings with Air Canada, with the assistance of mediator William Kaplan, in Toronto, CUPE said in a statement on Facebook. The strike is still on, it said.
The two sides had not spoken since before the start of the strike.
Earlier, Reuters exclusively reported the two sides were holding talks. A source said there are discussions being held on whether to hold mediation, but with the condition that the flight attendants return to work.
Canadian Jobs Minister Patty Hajdu urged both parties to return to the negotiating table and reach a collective agreement for workers as soon as possible.
Air Canada CEO Mike Rousseau on Monday defended the airline’s offer of a 38% boost in compensation to striking flight attendants but said there was a big gap compared with the union’s demand and did not offer a path to return to negotiations.
Hours later, jobs minister Hajdu raised pressure on Air Canada, saying she was launching a probe into airline pay and that a negotiated agreement between workers and the company would produce “the best deal.”
Hajdu and Rousseau’s comments followed the union’s refusal of a federal labor board’s order to return to work. That refusal has created a three-way standoff between the company, workers and the government, and raised the stakes in a dispute that has disrupted flights for hundreds of thousands of travelers during tourist season.
Flight attendants want higher wages and to be paid for time spent boarding passengers and other duties on the ground. They currently are not paid specifically for such work, and Hajdu in her comments on X voiced surprise at what she called allegations of unpaid work at the airline, which for months has been in on-and-off contract talks that prominently included the ground pay demands.
“I’ve ordered a probe into the allegation of unpaid work in the airline sector,” said Hajdu, who on the weekend kicked off the effort to force binding arbitration that would end the strike, contrary to union wishes.
(Reporting by Allison Lampert in Montreal, Promit Mukherjee in Ottawa, Ryan Patrick Jones in Toronto, and Rajesh Kumar Singh in Chicago. Additional reporting by Gertrude Chavez-Drefuss and Doyinsola Oladipo in New York, Kyaw Soe Oo in Toronto and Aishwarya Jain in Bengaluru; Writing by Peter Henderson and Caroline Stauffer; Editing by Marguerita Choy, Arun Koyyur, Rod Nickel, Matthew Lewis and Sam Holmes)
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