Ryanair’s recognition of trade unions eight years ago was like a “reverse divorce,” according to the company’s chief people officer, Darrell Hughes. “We had 20 years of acrimony then we tried to have a wedding”.
Speaking at the McCann FitzGerald Industrial Relations News conference at Belfield on Thursday, Mr Hughes said senior management at the company had long known union recognition would become inevitable as it expanded its operations in parts of mainland and southern Europe. The timing of its about turn on engagement across the 24 countries in which it has bases had been forced upon it, he said, though, by a series of its own “missteps” back in late 2017.
In particular, he cited problems with a pilot roster that prompted mass flight cancellations, heightened tensions internally and handed momentum to the long-running campaign by unions for recognition.
Before that, he acknowledged, the company had been “held up as the poster boy, and not just in Ireland, in other countries ... I mean, we were run out of Denmark in 2014 because we wouldn’t recognise unions. Then we had to try to talk to them after recognition, which is a challenge.”
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He said once the company decided to change its position, however, it “jumped in with both feet,” tackling the issue with the same determination it applied in other areas.
A key priority had been making it clear to some 20 unions across the Continent that while it would engage on a range of issues, it would not compromise on productivity.
“For us, productivity trumps pay nine times out of 10. And once we had that guiding light, that we weren’t going to give up on flexibility and productivity, and got the union side to understand that, then it started to unlock a bit more progress.”
He said the process was helped, from the company’s perspective, by the fact that its employees’ terms and conditions, were “generally good”.
The staff, he said, wanted changes to the way they were represented, “there was lots that the union side and the committee sides wanted to tweak and improve. But it wasn’t about ripping up all of the good things that they had.”
Nevertheless, he acknowledged, the process across its international operations was “exceptionally complex” because thousands of staff previously employed under contracts drawn up according to Irish employment law had to have their terms localised “and naturally people wanted to cherry pick the best of both, but also because you suddenly “have all these people across a table who had been at each other’s throats, in some cases, for a couple of decades”.
A long process of building trust has been required to overcome the latter challenge, he said, but a small number of legal cases are still ongoing in relation to the former, he said.
Eight years on, he said, “there are still a lot of non-union companies out there, but I suppose we are an example now of how it can work.”
Despite that, he believes it is important Ireland retain its voluntarist model because of its importance to many employers in the FDI sector. “Whether we like or not, in this country we rely a lot on foreign direct investment from multinational companies. And it is a priority issue for them to know that they’re still able to deal with directly with their people.
“I think the big fear of most non-union employers is about speed of decision making. I think in our case, we’ve got a good balance where the operational the speed of operational decision making hasn’t been affected but we have a new process, well, new to us, for how we negotiate terms and conditions and look after the interests of members. Those things are probably less in conflict than we probably thought they were before we went into it.”
Katie Morgan, of Fórsa, which represents many Ryanair workers in Ireland either directly, or through Ialpa, said gaining recognition had been an important success but the process hadn’t been helped by the high profile nature of the company’s previous stance.
Now, she says, she would like other companies to see it has worked because what “this boils down to is a group of workers coming together to try to improve and protect their terms and conditions, and us trying to support them through that. I think sometimes it’s unhelpful for employers to see it as something worse.”
