WestJet Grounded 250,000 Travellers. The Fix Took One Weekend.
WestJet flight attendants reached a tentative deal ending a strike that cancelled 615 flights and disrupted 250,000 travellers over a long weekend.
WestJet flight attendants walked off the job at 2:01 a.m. Sunday, cancelling nearly all mainline flights during one of Canada's busiest travel weekends. By Monday, the union representing 4,400 cabin crew had a tentative deal in hand — details are still under wraps ahead of a ratification vote.
Why You Should Care
If you had a flight booked anywhere near this past weekend, you already felt this one directly — 615 cancelled flights and roughly 250,000 disrupted travellers isn't a rounding error, it's a real chunk of the country's air travel grinding to a halt. But even if you weren't flying, the underlying fight matters: it's the same one that stranded half a million Air Canada passengers last August, over whether flight attendants get paid for the hours they work on the ground, not just the hours the plane is actually moving.
Complex to Simple
Picture being paid only for the minutes your car's engine is running — not the time you spend loading groceries, buckling in kids, or scraping ice off the windshield. That's essentially how flight attendant pay has worked for decades: compensation kicks in when the aircraft doors close and the plane starts moving, not during boarding, delays, or the hour of prep beforehand. This dispute, like Air Canada's last summer, is about closing that gap.
What Both Sides Are Saying
WestJet says it offered a 13% wage increase this year plus 2.5% annually through 2029, along with additional pay for all hours worked — an offer it made public over the weekend, a move aviation experts called a pressure tactic aimed at the union. CUPE's WestJet component says the union deserves better and wants the government to stay out of the bargaining process, pointedly noting that when Ottawa forced Air Canada attendants back to work last year, they defied the order anyway.
What's Next
Watch the ratification vote in the coming days — if cabin crew reject the tentative deal the way Air Canada workers initially rejected part of theirs last August, this story isn't actually over.
