CALGARY—Call it turbulence that they just couldn’t go around.

WestJet Airlines could be mere days away from seeing its pilots walk out of the cockpit and onto the picket line.

Some industry experts say its labour woes are an inevitable hurdle for a fast-growing company that began as a low-cost upstart over two decades ago but now flies more than a third of the country’s passengers.

But one analyst warns the Calgary-based carrier could stumble badly if it doesn’t start taking a more realistic and enlightened view toward unionization drives involving their pilots and other employees.

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AltaCorp Capital’s Chris Murray — who recently downgraded his rating of the company to underperform — said WestJet management’s plan to use an outside provider to staff its new, ultra-low-fare carrier Swoop is an “egregious shot across the bow” of its nascent pilots’ union that thumbs its nose at labour law and is almost certain to fail.

When the pilots were represented by an employee association, WestJet had agreed they would fly all of the company’s flights, Murray said in an interview with the Star.

“But now that they want to unionize, they’ve said, ‘No that’s not the case and we’re going to hire third-party pilots at a different set of wage rates,’” he said.

“A lot of the pilots are saying, ‘Hang on! You’re actually displacing WestJet routes and using WestJet planes, so tell me how you’re not outsourcing my job.’”

The unit of the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) representing 1,500 cockpit staff voted 91 per cent in favour of a strike last week, although it said it would hold off on any job action until after the Victoria Day weekend.

WestJet spokeswoman Lauren Stewart said the airline has made every effort since last summer to engage with the union in a constructive dialogue about Swoop so that company pilots can benefit when the new carrier starts operations next month.

“In the meantime, WestJet continues to work diligently with ALPA on a collective agreement...and we remain confident that we will come to an agreement that will benefit the pilots and the company as a whole,” Stewart said in a prepared answer to questions.

Barry Prentice, professor in the Asper School of Business at the University of Manitoba and an airline industry expert, believes the creation of Swoop was more about carving out a section of the market and scaring off other potential low-cost carriers.

“It’s more a threat tactic to reduce competition than it is necessarily a money-making opportunity for them,” he said. “If you have deep pockets and you have a diversified business, you can cross-subsidize a losing venture for a while.”

Prentice said WestJet started out as a copy of Southwest Airlines — North America’s largest low-cost airline — but it has grown to become a major national carrier over the last 22 years.

Now instead of point-to-point service, it is switching to a hub-and-spoke model, with Calgary as its major centre, and Vancouver and Toronto as two secondary hubs.

He’s not sure that there will be a synergy between that more traditional model and the airline’s proposed Swoop carrier once it’s up and running.

If anything, trying to do both at once has led WestJet pilots to organize and fight to protect their interests.

“This is really about evolution, we’re essentially going back to what we had 20-odd years ago when we had Canadian Air and Air Canada,” Prentice said.

Rob McFadyen, who heads the WestJet pilots union, said Swoop is a clear case of the carrier outsourcing work on routes normally flown by WestJet pilots.

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“It’s certainly something we want to be addressed in the contract negotiations,” said McFadyen, adding he couldn’t think of a scenario where there could be a two-tiered system of pilots flying under WestJet.

As WestJet moves from the little airline that could to a national carrier, pilots aren’t the only staff looking to labour unions for help.

Hugh Pouliot, senior communications officer with the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), confirmed that some members of WestJet’s cabin crew approached them with an interest in organizing, and the drive is now on.

He said that, in the early days, the company culture was employee-focused but “the culture there has definitely changed — that’s what we’ve heard.”

He said CUPE is encouraged by how the drive has gone so far.

WestJet shares have fallen 25 per cent in value so far this year, including an 11 per cent nosedive last week amid disappointing first-quarter results and concerns about the pilots walkout.

That concern has the airline predicting a two per cent drop in revenues per available seat mile this quarter, but Murray thinks the decrease could be double that.

WestJet also faces unionizing drives targeting its airport staff and baggage handlers.

Murray thinks a brief interruption at WestJet is possible due to a pilots strike, but he believes the federal government will legislate them back to work and possibly impose binding arbitration on the company rather than risk public ire from a prolonged stoppage that would see 35 per cent of air traffic in the country disrupted.

While getting a first contract is never easy, he said, the behaviour of WestJet during the recent two-month conciliation period, with its organizing pilots, suggests management doesn’t appreciate that the federal labour law governing the aviation sector is fairly friendly to employees who want to collectively bargain.

“WestJet showed up for 14 of 60 days, which begs the question of WestJet: ‘Guys are you actually taking this seriously?’” Murray said.

“What the guys at WestJet never understood is that you’re in Canada and you can’t jam a union.”

— With files from Kashmala Fida, StarMetro Edmonton

Correction - May 15, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said WestJet employees can no longer take some of their pay in company shares. In fact, shares are still an option for compensation.

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