WestJet Grounds Mainline Fleet as 4,400 Flight Attendants Strike Over Unpaid Ground Time

Canada’s airline sector has entered a rolling wave of labour militancy reminiscent of the 1966 Canadian airline flight attendants’ walkout and, more broadly, the 1970s U.S. railroad strikes that leveraged peak-season pressure. Like Air Canada’s 2025 four-day shutdown and Delta’s 2022 boarding-pay concession, today’s action challenges the century-old ‘block-hour’ pay model that treats ground time as free labour. The dispute sits at the intersection of post-COVID labour scarcity, inflation-driven wage catch-up, and a North American trend in which airline unions seize holiday chokepoints to maximise leverage while governments hesitate to impose back-to-work orders after last year’s legal defiance. On a 100-year arc, the strike signals a possible inflection where service-sector workers re-establish compensation for previously invisible work—much as the 1934 Railway Labor Act expansion did for U.S. airlines—potentially rewriting compensation norms long after today’s cancelled flights are forgotten.