Daily Times

TAIPEI: Taiwan’s first ever strike by cabin crew, which left 20,000 passengers without flights, ended Friday after China Airlines bowed to almost all of staff’s demands.

The strike on the island’s biggest carrier ended late in the evening after hours of negotiations between unions and the airline’s newly appointed management.

“After a marathon negotiation of four and a half hours, we got a good deal,” Chao Kang, the head of the Taoyuan Flight Attendant Union, told hundreds of excited union members gathered outside the CAL office in Taipei. The strikers, many in tears, chanted: “Victory for flight attendants”.

The airline was forced to cancel all flights out of the two main airports in the capital Taipei — the only exception a chartered service for President Tsai Ing-wen, who left for a state visit to Panama and Paraguay Friday morning. Crowds of passengers queued up at CAL counters in Taipei’s Songshan and Taoyuan airports as the airline tried to get them onto different flights.

Hundreds of flight attendants staged a sit-in outside the firm’s office in Taipei on Thursday night, protesting a new requirement that they report for work in Taoyuan rather than downtown Songshan airport.