Would you turn down a 42% raise over four years? Air Canada’s 5,400 pilots did not, voting 67% in favour of the tentative agreement reached a month ago.
Still, one-third of pilots voted against the deal, reflecting ongoing issues around scheduling, quality of life and a large pay gap between newer employees and more experienced pilots.
“It is not a perfect agreement,” said Charlene Hudy, who chairs the Airline Pilots Association’s Air Canada contingent, on a conference call with reporters. “It does show that there’s room for improvement,” “There’s a contingent of my pilots right now who clearly may not agree with me.”
Air Canada president and CEO Michael Rousseau (Photo Credit: Air Canada Media License)
Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau celebrated the ratified deal. “The agreement is mutually beneficial and it will keep our pilots the best compensated in Canada and provide the work-life balance improvements they were seeking. At the same time, the agreement gives our company flexibility and creates a framework for future growth of the airline and its network.”
The tentative contract was reached on September 14 after more than a year of negotiations. At that time, Air Canada was already beginning to wind down operations in preparation for a strike that would have resulted in 670 daily flight cancellations impacting over 100,000 passengers
Hudy told reporters that the union had achieved as much as it could. “We pushed Air Canada as far as we could push them to extract as much value as possible.”
The previous pilot agreement, achieved under the leadership of former AC CEO Calin Rovinescu, provided wage hikes of 2% per year over a period of 10 years.
With this contract, pilots will see a 26% wage bump for the fiscal year just passed and a hike of 4% in each of 2024, 2025 and 2026.