I love it! How much fun would it be to have Milton check you in?
CAW dismisses Air Canada executives' work
By KEITH McARTHUR
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
UPDATED AT 1:59 AM EDT Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2003
The union representing Air Canada's customer service workers yesterday brushed off efforts by Air Canada chief Robert Milton to pitch in on the front lines.
Facing its biggest customer service crisis since it merged operations with Canadian Airlines in 2000, Air Canada yesterday announced that executives and managers would "offer their support" to unionized agents at key airports across the country.
The Canadian Auto Workers union, which represents customer service agents, said it may file a grievance, or take other action, over this infringement onto unionized work.
"If they're doing our work, they're going to force the CAW to respond in an unpleasant manner," said Gary Fane, director of transport at the CAW.
The Canadian Union of Public Employees, which represents flight attendants, has also sent a note to its members urging them not to help out the short-staffed customer service workers.
Spokeswoman Laura Cooke said Mr. Milton spent about six hours helping out yesterday morning at the Montreal airport, giving directions to passengers and accompanying a child to the departure gate.
"Robert was walking around the airport, talking to employees and customers, getting feedback and giving assistance where possible," she said.
Mr. Fane said the executive assistance appears to be little more than a public relations exercise.
"What would be welcome is they do their jobs and let our members do our jobs—meaning bring some of them that you've laid off back to work," he said.
"Mr. Milton working as a check-in agent isn't going to solve the problem, God bless his little heart."
Air Canada reported "stable" operations and "improving" customer service levels yesterday, after flight delays at its Toronto hub averaging 30 to 40 minutes on Sunday, and 11 minutes Monday.
"The situation has progressively improved in the past two days and we expect that customer service levels will continue to improve in the coming days at airports throughout the country," Rob Giguere, executive vice president of operations, said in a release.
"We apologize to those customers who have been inconvenienced in any way over the past 48 hours."
Air Canada says the delayed flights are the inevitable by-product of the airline's restructuring, which involves major changes in the way customer service workers do their jobs.
The airline is in the process of reducing its annual labour bill by about one-third. Ms. Cooke said the airline has already laid off 193 customer service workers and reduced 114 jobs to part-time status.
Gary Buchanan of Nashville Tenn. said his experience with Air Canada was so bad that he may never visit Canada again.
Mr. Buchanan and his wife missed their connecting flight home when their Air Canada flight from Halifax arrived in Toronto two hours late Monday.
The airline put them up in a hotel Monday night. But yesterday, their rescheduled 9:20 a.m. flight was cancelled.
"This was our first trip to Halifax and—as my wife said—we just don't want to come back," Mr. Buchanan said yesterday as he waited for the next scheduled flight to Nashville at 4:30 p.m.
"The country's beautiful. The people in Halifax are wonderful but Air Canada needs somebody to take them over. I understand the government used to run them—maybe that's what ought to happen [again]."
Meanwhile, WestJet Airlines Ltd. released statistics yesterday showing that it flew 41.5 per cent more passenger traffic last month than it did in July of 2002. Capacity was up 46.3 per cent over the period.
The airline said it flew 493.5 million revenue passenger miles last month, compared with 348.8 million RPMs last July. RPMs measure the number of passengers multiplied by the average length of a trip.
Since it first launched in 1996, WestJet has grown at a rate of 40 to 50 per cent a year, to become the main domestic competitor to Air Canada.
WestJet is almost as big as the domestic operations of Canadian Airlines International Ltd. in its last summer as a independent carrier.
Canadian Airlines flew 555 million domestic RPMs in July of 1999, plus an additional 104 million RPMs at its regional affiliate Canadian Regional Air Lines.