The union that represents about 10,000 striking Air Canada flight attendants said in a message to its members on Tuesday that it had reached a tentative contract deal with the airline.
“The Strike has ended. We have a tentative agreement we will bring forward to you,” the union said in a post on its website, reported Bloomberg.
The strike was affecting about 130,000 travellers a day at the peak of the summer travel season. It led to the cancellation of hundreds of flights and disrupted air travel across Canada.
Flight attendants walked off the job early Saturday, after turning down the airline's request to enter into government-directed arbitration, which allows a third-party mediator to decide the terms of a new contract.
Air Canada and Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) have been in contract talks for about eight months but remained undecided on the issue of pay and the unpaid work that flight attendants do when planes aren't in the air.
The Canada Industrial Relations Board had declared the strike illegal Monday and ordered the flight attendants back on the job.
But the union said it would defy the directive. Union leaders also ignored a weekend order to submit to binding arbitration and end the strike by Sunday afternoon.
The airline's latest offer included a 38 per cent increase in total compensation, including benefits and pensions, over four years, that it said “would have made our flight attendants the best compensated in Canada.”
But the union pushed back, saying the proposed 8 per cent raise in the first year didn't go far enough because of inflation.
Air Canada and its low-cost affiliate Air Canada Rouge carry about 130,000 customers a day. The airline is also the foreign carrier with the largest number of flights to the US and operates around 700 flights per day.
The airline estimated Monday that 500,000 customers would be affected by flight cancellations.
Aviation analytics firm Cirium said that as of Monday afternoon, Air Canada had called off at least 1,219 domestic flights and 1,339 international flights since last Thursday, when the carrier began gradually suspending its operations ahead of the strike and lockout, reported Reuters.
