YVR and YYC Unifor Bargaining Update

September has been a busy and exciting month for your Bargaining Committee members.  We spent two weeks together, one in YYC and one in YVR, getting to know each other and putting together our very first collective agreement proposal.  We compiled all the suggestions you gave us during the zoom calls in August, as well as the ideas you’ve emailed us. 

We’ve also referred to the Flight Attendants and Pilots agreements and leaned heavily on the experience and expertise of our Unifor leaders, Frances, Leslie and Billy.  Our work isn’t entirely done yet, but we will be working hard over the next couple of weeks to ensure we have put together a comprehensive collective agreement that reflects the needs of our membership.

With that being said, we are happy to announce that bargaining dates have been set!  We will be coming together with WestJet beginning the week of October 18th for four days and the week of October 25th for three days.  These meetings will be held in YVR first due to the Covid-19 restrictions currently in place in Alberta. 

(*** We are also very excited to announce that Jerry Dias, National President of Unifor and Scott Doherty, Executive Assistant to the President of Unifor, who oversees the Airline sector, will be joining us for our first day of bargaining.)   

We also have plans to meet the following weeks:
November 8th -10th
November 22nd -24th
November 29 – December 2nd
December 7th – 9th

*Locations of these meetings are TBA due to the pandemic.

It is an exciting time for the WestJet airport teams at YVR and YYC!  Mark Enns (YVR), Karen Berry (YVR), Sherwin Antonio (YYC) and Jamie Mote (YYC) will be off the floor at the airport for the months of October and November, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t accessible to you.  We will be busy preparing for bargaining and setting up our new Unifor Local 531. 

If you have any concerns, questions or suggestions or need support at the airport with any issues, please reach out to any of your bargaining committee members.  We also encourage you to reach out if you have any last-minute bargaining points you’d like to have us possibly cover in our agreement.  We are here for you, and we are listening.

We have also been supporting Westjetters in YYZ and YEG, who are excited to join us as members of Unifor.

If you have friends that work at these bases and have not yet signed a Unifor membership card, let them know that they can do this at join.unifor.org/federalcard

Together, we fly.

Your  Unifor 531 Bargaining Committee;
Sherwin Antonio-YYC, Lindsay Landry - YYC, Jamie Mote-YYC, Sandeep Samrai-YYC, Karen Berry-YVR, Mark Enns-YVR- Breanne Laihow-YVR, Frances Galambosy, Unifor National Representative and Leslie Dias, Unifor Director of Airlines