The union representing Air Canada’s pilots is set to announce results Thursday of a vote on whether to ratify the richest contract offer in the airline’s history.
Voting by roughly 5,300 members of the Air Line Pilots Association closes at 10 a.m. Thursday. The results are expected to be made public within a few hours of the closing of the voting, which has been going on since Oct. 1.
If the deal is rejected, Charlene Hudy, the head of ALPA’s Air Canada bargaining unit, has said she would step down.
It’s also unclear what would happen in the immediate aftermath of a rejection.
If the union intends to strike, it would have to give 72 hours notice. The company would have to do the same if it intended to lock its pilots out.
The deal had initially seemed to avoid the prospect of a strike or lockout, which could have led to more than 600 flights a day being cancelled, and affected more than 100,000 passengers a day.
Before the tentative agreement was reached, business lobby groups in Canada and the U.S. had urged the federal government to step in pre-emptively to prevent a strike.
The four-year deal, agreed to in September, would see pilots get raises of almost 40 per cent.
It includes a 26 per cent raise in the first year, followed by increases of four per cent in each of the following years. The initial 26 per cent increase is also retroactive to last year.
But the deal still includes a dramatic pay gap between junior pilots and their more experienced peers, with first year pilots earning as little as $75,700, while experienced pilots on wide-body planes like a Boeing 777 can earn as much as $367,000.
That gap, labour and industy experts said, likely pushed many junior pilots to vote against the deal.
More to come
