WestJet pilots vote to reject contract offer
WestJet pilots have firmly rejected the company’s latest contract offer, casting doubt on the airline’s wide-body expansion plans and highlighting its ongoing labour challenges.
The Calgary-based airline, which launched transatlantic service to London-Gatwick in May, has said it needs to ink a new deal with its pilots before it can expand its widebody fleet beyond the four Boeing 767s it currently operates.
A tentative agreement laying the groundwork for that expansion was reached at the end of October with the WestJet Pilots’ Association, the non-unionized employee group that negotiates on behalf of the company’s pilots, and then put out to an employee-wide vote.
The deal would have offered more hourly pay for all pilots and higher pay for those who fly widebody aircraft, and would have converted stock options to base pay. However, it was rejected by 80 per cent of pilots who voted. A second agreement, which allowed pilots to retain stock options and offered higher pay to pilots flying wide-body aircraft, was rejected by 57 per cent of pilots.
“We are disappointed in the outcome of the vote and will be meeting with the WestJet Pilots’ Association over the coming weeks to determine next steps,” WestJet spokeswoman Lauren Stewart said in an email.
The developments coincide with at least two unionization campaigns at the famously non-union airline. A group of WestJet pilots came close to forming a union in 2015, organizing a secret ballot vote that ended with 45 per cent of pilots voting in favour of certification. Since that narrow loss, the group has turned to the Air Line Pilots Association — the world’s largest pilots union, representing 54,000 pilots at 31 U.S. and Canadian airlines — for help regrouping.
A group of WestJet flight attendants, calling themselves the West- Jet Professional Flight Attendants Association, is trying to unionize that employee group. The association has set Nov. 30 as the last day for WestJet flight attendants to request and mail their signed membership applications.
“We can confidently say that if we reach our sign-up targets by Nov. 30, flight attendants will have taken an important first step to improve their scheduling, relationships and working conditions,” said interim president Tara Mowat on the group’s website.
The federal Liberal government is in the process of repealing a law passed under the Harper Conservatives that made getting union certification in federally regulated industries more difficult. Once that happens, automatic union certification will once again be triggered if 50 per cent of employees in an organization sign union cards, with no need for a secret ballot vote.
Chris Murray, an analyst with AltaCorp Capital Inc., said the unionization drives illustrate the “cultural challenges” WestJet is encountering as it grows from a small, low-cost airline with a simple business model to a complex operation striving to compete with legacy carrier Air Canada.
“Labour disruption is always a concern in some form,” Murray said. “I don’t think we’re heading to that, but this does add some uncertainty heading into the new year.”
As for the pilots rejecting the latest contract, Murray said he believes WestJet will go back to the bargaining table. But he said he is concerned that if the pilots demand more money, it could make WestJet’s wide-body ambitions cost-prohibitive.
“The economics need to make sense in order to operate that, and that includes the wage profile of running the wide-body fleet,” Murray said. “These are all things that I think they’ll deal with in time, but it does kind of increase the risk profile of the company.”