Yahoo Finance Porter strike resolved, but miscommunication remains
Customers of Porter Airlines will be pleased to learn that the Toronto Island-based company has resolved its six-month battle with its fuelling crews. Porter’s 22 fuelers, all members of the Canadian Office and Professional Employees (COPE) union, walked out in mid-January after negotiations around wages broke down. Replacement workers were brought into fill the breach.
If the presence of the contract staff didn’t make things icy enough, relations between the two sides took a turn for the worst in April when Porter launched a $4-million lawsuit against both the union and its strike co-ordinator Mary Stalteri for allegedly broadcasting libelous tweets.
Porter alleges it was defamed by two videos, which showed a fake Porter plane crash and a fake advertisement, the Canadian Press reports citing court documents. Porter says the tweets and videos disseminated “false and misleading” information about safety and training practices.
All litigation between both sides has since been withdrawn, the CBC reports.
The airline clearly has a dim view of any misinformation about its operations being distributed, which is ironic given the release Porter issued Tuesday announcing that an agreement had been reached between the two sides.
Noting at the top that “You will not notice any difference in our flights,” the release goes on to state that “Throughout the strike, Porter maintained its same efficient service, with no disruption to flights.”
That would surely come as news to anyone relying on Porter to get home from New York on Sunday evening. Not one but two evening flights were still on their way from Toronto, long after they were scheduled to have taken off from Newark airport. The delays, according to gate personnel, were due to re-fueling issues in Toronto.
As a result of arriving late, both flights missed their departure window, which is no small disruption at Newark, or pretty much any major U.S. airport, where a missed window can mean waiting at the back of the line for another opportunity. In this instance, the back of the line meant nearly two hours idling on the tarmac, waiting for the bigger jets from bigger airlines to go ahead.
By the time the flights took off, Toronto Island’s curfew had passed, requiring both planes to be re-routed midflight to Pearson, where passengers sat until the wee hours of Monday morning on a remote area outside Terminal 3, waiting for a bus to clear security and deliver them to customs.
By today’s standards, arriving at the wrong airport, three-and-a-half hours later than expected, falls short of a ruinous outcome. However, when it happens to two planes, on the same night, both as a result of fueling delays, it’s a little rich for the airline to send out a release scarcely a day later congratulatory itself twice in the first two sentences for its efficiency, and for having never disrupted a flight.
When asked about the release, Porter’s media manager Brad Cicero quickly followed up, explaining that by “no disruption”, the airline means, “there was never a wholesale disruption to flight schedules as a result of the strike ... This is not to say that individual delays could not occur for individual reasons, such as that described above. This is a normal part of running an airline operation over the course of a given time.”
He would go on to add that given the choice between not flying out that night or arriving at the wrong airport, most passengers would consider the first option much more disruptive.
