Solidarity Takes Flight: The Case of Ryanair

By Ethan Whitener

In December 2017 Europe’s second-largest airline, Ryanair, announced it would recognize unions for the first time. Journalists scrambled to outwit each other, attaching their bylines to articles such as, “Ryanair to Recognize Unions Even Though Hell Hasn’t Frozen Over,” or, “Ryanair Chief Finally Armless Against Unions.” The press focused its attention on CEO Michael O’Leary because of his outspoken opposition to organized labor and his downright crass attitude towards, well, everything.

But the press did not cover the transnational organizing and pan-European solidarity that pressured Ryanair into negotiations. The ongoing campaign to organize Ryanair’s workforce involves rank-and-file cabin crew, grounds crew, established pilots’ unions, and the International Transport Workers’ Federation. Until it happened, labor scholars and spectators declared it impossible. But over the course of two years Ryanair’s executives went from boasting about their union-free workforce to scrambling to explain to passengers why flight crews went out on strike across Europe.

Roughly half of Ryanair’s cabin crew and pilots now work under a collective bargaining agreement or something similar, and another thirty percent have a framework agreement. This could not have happened without bottom-up pressure from rank-and-file workers and legitimate, Pan-European solidarity.

As multinational corporations continue to compete on the basis of labor costs by expanding their terrain of operation and dividing the workforce along lines of nationality and cost-of-living, workers have responded, and will continue to respond, by building solidarity—an ancient solution to a modern problem. Ryanair workers’ campaign against their employer gives us an example of how workers build strong associational power to ensure multinational corporations’ pursuit of cheap labor does not end in a race to the bottom.

The Story

Ryanair was established in 1985, but did not take off until the company sent Michael O’Leary to Texas to learn cost-cutting from executives at Southwest Airlines. He returned with a low-cost business model. After restructuring in 1997, Ryanair became a public company. Ryanair soon became the “world’s most profitable low-cost carrier,” in large part because they stuck to the original Southwest Airlines business model (O’Sullivan and Gunnigle 2009: 256).

Airlines such as Ryanair pursued cost advantages in the context of European flight deregulation of the late 1980s and early 90s. The deregulation of the airline industry reflects the broader success of neoliberal policies: competition on the basis of labor costs, the villainizing of organized labor, and the elimination of post-war social welfare programs.

Still, air travel is far from absolute deregulation. Pilots cannot fly more than a certain number of hours in a year, for example, and cabin crew must comply with similar safety regulations. Airlines across Europe pay the same prices for fuel, security, and navigation. Therefore, cost-cutters in the industry point their scalpel at labor costs. Historically, strong national unions prevented airlines from competing on the basis of labor costs. But until 2017, the national unions could not hold their ground against the highly-mobile, multi-national company Ryanair.

To ensure its ability to maintain a business model built on low labor costs, Ryanair has invested a lot of resources into keeping its workforce union-free. This is what labor scholars call an example of “low-road employment,” where “the business model directly influences its industrial relations approach to the detriment of employees” (O’Sullivan and Gunnigle 2009: 264). The company does not hide its anti-union stance: before union recognition in 2017, CEO Michael O’Leary famously said he would cut off his hand before he picked up a pen to sign a collective bargaining agreement.

Ryanair’s cost advantage comes from high labor productivity and low labor costs (Harvey and Turnbull 2015: 312). It hedges its business model on the bet that many travelers are willing to forgo comfort and customer service for a cheap flight. For short flights on the European continent, this makes some sense—anyone can tolerate an uncomfortable flight experience for an hour or two. But in 2017, after a number of failed union campaigns, British pilots made it clear that workers should not tolerate this trade off.

Pilots, the highest-paid airline workers, historically have been the first group of workers to secure collective bargaining rights with airlines. It takes a lot of training to become a pilot, so companies cannot replace workers easily in the event of a strike. This gives pilots what labor scholars call structural power in the employment relationship with their boss. In the case of Ryanair, the threat of a pilots’ strike during the 2017 Christmas holidays pressured the company to recognize the British pilots’ union. Pilots and cabin crew members in other countries, seeing the cracks in Ryanair’s anti-union foundation, built on that momentum, stating their own demands for union recognition. Pilots, by forcing the company’s hand to concede a willingness to bargain in the face of costly industrial action, opened the door for other airline workers with less structural power.

In the wake of the pilots’ victory, cabin crew across Europe began organizing themselves. Soon after, the Industrial Transport Workers’ Federation, an umbrella organization of transportation unions, responded to pressure from rank-and-file workers and created its own transnational campaign, Cabin Crew United. The ITF created a simple website, a digital space for cabin crew workers to sign onto the campaign and communicate with their co-workers. Rather than pour time and money into a complex digital campaign, the ITF opted for simplicity, recognizing that real solidarity cannot be fostered behind a computer screen.

Workers from eighty-six different bases across Europe signed onto the campaign and began coordinating industrial action for Easter and the summer flight season. On Easter Sunday of 2018, cabin crew in Portugal went on strike. The ITF used this opportunity to send out a survey to identify workplace issues. Nearly seven hundred workers responded to the survey, and the key issues surfaced: pressure for cabin crew to sell in-flight goods and the subcontracting of work to third-party agencies. In July, the ITF coordinated a summit to bring together cabin crew from twelve different countries. This kicked off a summer of industrial action, as cabin crews went on strike in many different countries demanding better working conditions and the application of their national labor laws, not the notoriously lax Irish labor law.

The issue of “home rule,” or the application of national labor law rather than Irish labor law, mobilized rank-and-file workers, and also got the attention of large European regulatory institutions and Ryanair shareholders. A year earlier, in September 2017, the European Court of Justice ruled against Ryanair’s labor model, which classified Ryanair employees under Irish labor law. Until that point, even if a cabin crew worker worked the duration of her career without setting foot in Ireland, she still fell under Irish labor and employment standards. This was integral to Ryanair’s business model, as a way for them to avoid meeting the employment standards of countries like Belgium or France, where employment provisions are more robust and take the form of paid leave and stronger protections for freedom of association.

When the European Court of Justice ruled against this labor model, shareholders in Ryanair, already concerned with the temperamental corporate governance of the company, questioned the viability of its labor model. This shareholder pressure forced David Bonderman, chair of the board, to step down, and helped push the company towards union recognition. In March 2019, Michael O’Leary stepped down from day-to-day operations, calling himself a distraction to the company. He claimed his antics helped Ryanair gain publicity earlier on, but now they threaten the maturity of the company. At the same time, he was offered a 100 million dollar bonus if the company reaches 2 billion dollars in profit or if share prices climb from their current price of ten-and-a-half euros per share to twenty-one euros per share.

Meanwhile national unions representing cabin crew and pilots continue their negotiations with the company. Italian cabin crew reached an agreement in fall of 2018. Earlier this year, Spanish cabin crew called off strikes after reaching a deal which includes the application of Spanish employment legislation for employees based in Spain. In February, Belgian Ryanair pilots voted ninety-eight percent in favor of a collective labor agreement. In March, ver.di signed a collective agreement with the company on behalf of German cabin crew. As Ryanair workers across Europe pressure the company to negotiate agreements, it is clear that cabin crew, ground staff, and pilots are not afraid to use their strike leverage to disrupt flights during the busy summer flight season.

Analysis of Power Resources

Historically, at the national and company level, aviation unions have exploited their structural power in the labor process (their strategic location in a high risk, tightly integrated, and interdependent system of flight operations) through robust forms of associational power (collective organization and representation) (Harvey and Turnbull 2015: 310).

For two decades Ryanair’s industrial relations model curbed the structural power of national aviation unions by limiting their ability to band together in shared struggle to make common demands. The company spread its workforce out among twenty-one different countries and eighty-six different bases. At the same time, Ryanair used third-party hiring agencies to distance itself from a traditional employment relationship. They were able to do this by classifying all their employees under Irish labor law regardless of whether employees worked in Ireland. This also curtailed the institutional power of national unions, who over time institutionalized employment protections into national law. These national-level strategies “are easily deflected by airlines that have created new European spatial-juridical fixes to exert control over labor and extract surplus value” (Harvey and Turnbull 2015: 322).

To combat this, Belgian Ryanair workers, who could not rely on the traditional strength of their national union, brought their complaint to the European Court of Justice, which eventually ruled against Ryanair’s classification of all its employees as Irish workers. This kind of legal battle, however, does not matter if the rank-and-file cannot sustain constant pressure on its national unions, as well as the employer. Institutional power, like structural power, is hollow without strong associational power. 

The ITF built associational power by facilitating transnational solidarity among Ryanair workers. Solidarity cannot be imposed by an umbrella organization, workers must decide to organize. But without the ITF’s resources and global scale, Ryanair workers could not have built such strong Pan-European solidarity. The workforce is spread out across eighty-six different bases in twenty-one different countries. This makes it a challenge to communicate with each other, especially considering that the work itself, for pilots and cabin crew, is transitory in nature.

While eight hundred cabin crew work out of London Stansted Airport, the labor process requires them to communicate in passing. For effective transnational strikes, the word must spread far and quickly. This works much better when the national unions all are in communication with each other. The ITF has no role in coordinating strike efforts, but the ITF does help facilitate communication among national unions, keeping rank-and-file workers abreast of developments in other workplaces. When a Portuguese flight crew calls a strike, the Italian workers know to stand in solidarity with them because of the existing communication networks.

The ITF also helped build lists and identify key issues for the campaign. It is difficult to build associational power during a transnational campaign because workers in different countries often have different priorities. By surveying the entirety of the Ryanair workforce, the ITF was able to show Ryanair workers at different bases that their interests aligned. Before the survey, individual workers talked with each other about how they couldn’t stand the unrealistic sales targets set by management. After the survey, workers across Europe realized their common struggle, key to building associational power. Transnational work and labor markets at Ryanair are important to the organizing success. The workers speak a common language and have the common experience of working under Irish labor law. This became another key issue in the campaign.

The ITF recognizes that without some institutional staying power, companies eventually figure out how to circumvent the organizing efforts of the employees. While Ryanair workers leveraged their structural and associational power to build transnational solidarity, to convert that disruption and solidarity into sustainable improvements in the lives of workers requires building institutional power. The ITF’s campaign website states, “Collective bargaining between workers and management is the only way to achieve fairness for pilots, cabin crew and ground crew. ITF, ETF and our affiliate unions are supporting workers to ensure this becomes a reality in every country where Ryanair operates” (ITF Global 2019).

For some rank-and-file workers across Europe who are fed up with kowtowing to elites and institutional decision makers in Brussels, the promise of the Ryanair campaign lies in the militancy of the rank-and-file, and the support of community allies. To build social power, workers must challenge the company narrative that greedy pilots and cabin crew are ruining European vacations. This should not be too difficult—Ryanair passengers have their own intimate frustrations with the low-cost model—the airline was recently named by consumer the worst airline in Europe for the sixth year in a row (BBC 2019). But this dissatisfaction has not translated into any sort of boycott activity—the company is on track to book more than one-and-a-half million passenger tickets this year. The company’s argument that cheap flights have democratized air travel throughout Europe goes relatively unchallenged—but that democracy comes at a great cost for workers and, as the debate about the ethics of air travel and climate change heats up, the environment.

Conclusions & Lessons Learned

What can workers, unions, and other social movements take away from this case study?

• Transnational solidarity is the necessary response to transnational union-busting. Ryanair’s network of eighty-six bases in twenty-one different countries gives the company flexibility to circumvent isolated incidents of industrial action. The company can break a strike of workers at one base, but cannot as quickly mitigate or explain away the effects of a strike that takes place in four different bases across Europe. The past two years of collective action at Ryanair prove workers are more than willing to act if they know their co-workers in other countries will stand in solidarity. The simple presence of national unions is not enough to counter business models built to circumvent those unions, transnational organizing is necessary.
• Simple digital organizing campaigns work. The International Transport Workers’ Federation created a simple website to harvest names and information of interested Ryanair cabin crew. The ITF recognized that 1) the digital organizing was already happening on a local level, and 2) cabin crew workers do not have time to sift through a crowded website to sign up for the campaign. The Cabin Crew United campaign is an example of a simple, effective use of digital platforms to organize.
• Pilots and cabin crew stand together collectively to improve working conditions. Despite differences in status and pay, the campaign to organize Ryanair’s workforce depended on the willingness of cabin crew and pilots to pool their institutional power. Both workforces went on strike in 2018 in countries across Europe. The willingness of pilots to use their structural power to force union recognition by the company opened the door for cabin crew to press their own demands.
• Wages are not the only concern of airline workers. Survey data from the ITF Cabin Crew United campaign show that workers demanded not only higher pay but also the elimination of unrealistic in-flight sales expectations, the elimination of third-party contracting and agency work, and the adoption of “home rule” employment law, not Irish law, for all its workers. While Ryanair workers continue to negotiate for better pay, they also want to force Ryanair to adopt a more traditional employment relationship rather than circumvent long-standing European labor regulations. Rank-and-file workers recognize how the fragmented workplace negatively impacts their own lives. Accordingly, they centralized these concerns throughout the campaign.
• The fight is not over! While Ryanair workers gained landmark victories with the 2017 European Court of Justice ruling against Ryanair’s employment model, subsequent union recognition, and the negotiation of a number of different collective bargaining agreements with national unions across Europe, the work is not yet finished. As the busy travel season approaches and negotiations fail to produce contracts between labor and management, look for the rank-and-file cabin crew, their network of national unions, and the ITF to do what they need to do to ensure the company does not wait for hell to freeze over before signing collective agreements. Even though Michael O’Leary and David Bonderman are no longer conducting the anti-union symphony, the unions have no illusions that others at the helm are eager to cooperate. The continued willingness of workers to stand in transnational solidarity, along with a sympathetic consumer base, will ensure that Ryanair does not land the plane before its workers across Europe secure beneficial employment contracts.

Links for Further Reading:

Harvey, G., & Turnbull, P. (2015). Can labor arrest the “sky pirates”? Transnational trade unionism in the European civil aviation industry. Labor History, 56(3), 308-326.

This article, written before union recognition of Ryanair workers, outlines the need for transnational organizing in response to the social dumping of Ryanair. The authors argue in favor of a Euro-democratizing strategy rather than a solution that depends solely on national unions or technocratic maneuvering by European institutions in Brussels. Without democratic pressure from rank-and-file workers, companies seeking labor cost advantages circumvent the institutional power represented by the European Court of Justice or the ITF. (Limited access)

ITF Global: Website for RyanAir campaign.

This is a link to ITF Global’s campaign to organize Ryanair workers. A link to the Cabin Crew United website, a simple tool to build the lists of Ryanair cabin crew across Europe, is found on the right-handed side of the page, where it says, “Campaign Website.” By clicking around at the various links on the website, one appreciates the breadth and resources of ITF Global’s network. (Open access)

Martin, J. (2019) Ryanair Named ‘Worst Short-Haul Airline‘. BBC News, January 5, 2019.

O’Sullivan, M. and P. Gunnigle (2009) Bearing All the Hallmarks of Oppression” Union Avoidance in Europe’s Largest Low-cost Airline. Labor Studies Journal, 34(2), 252-270. .

This article, written in 2009 before union recognition, outlines Ryanair’s union-busting strategy. The authors present extensive evidence of the company’s antiunion behavior, especially the efforts to suppress strikes by the Services, Industrial, Professional and Technical Union. The article shows the structural power of pilots, but also the great lengths the company went to in order to maintain a nonunion workforce. (Limited access)

Strangler, C. (2018) Trouble in the Skies over Europe. The Atlantic, September 28, 2018.

Tsang, A. (2018) Ryanair, Long Opposed to Unions, Grapples With Strikes in Europe. New York Times, July 25, 2018.

These articles trace the development of Ryanair organizing, from union-busting to union recognition to industrial action in the summer of 2018. Both articles show the importance of the rank-and-file pressure to build associational power through national unions and the ITF. (Semi-Limited access)