Ryanair’s ‘terror regime’ comes under heavy fire from pilots
LONDON: Ryanair is coming under heavy fire from pilots uneasy with its management style and working conditions, just as complaints from passengers incensed by its mass cancellations in September start to ease off.
In a company which does not recognise any official union, pilots have been taking to social media to call for dialogue, and to share their anger at a management class they accuse of disdain.
“There’s an obvious haemorrhaging of pilots,” said one former Ryanair co-pilot who recently left for another airline.
“They leave because they’re fed up with being treated like numbers”, he said, condemning “the management’s terror regime”.
“The problem was brewing and it just took a spark to set the whole thing alight,” he said of the thousands of cancelled flights, which the company’s brash director general Michael O’Leary blamed on glitches in holiday leave planning.
Ryanair management denied these “hearsay claims” and pointed out that all 86 of Ryanair’s air bases had elected pilot representatives who were able to enter into negotiations without “fear or terror”.
Internally, the exclusive reliance on employee representation committees (ERC) for dialogue is heavily questioned.
Pilots active on the Aviation Professionals Unite website say they have sent their boss a letter from 60 ERCs to ask for the creation of a pan-European body to represent all pilots.
Ryanair management has dismissed the move as an “anonymous letter” sent by competitor pilot unions.
Pilots said employees including flight attendants, ground crew and administrative staff had issues with management.
“For most pilots, the problem is not financial,” said a Ryanair pilot earning €5,400 (RM26,550) a month. “It’s more that the system makes us tired and demotivated.”
The pilot is one of many to condemn the two-tier system in which the company’s 4,000 pilots operate.
While some are directly employed by Ryanair, with contracts signed in the countries where they are based, others are selfemployed through a multitude of Irish structures and, therefore, lose out on healthcare and pension benefits.
This is straight-forward “social barbarism”, according to the pilot, though Ryanair says it employs pilots in “exactly the same way” as its low-cost rivals.