Ryanair and the Two-tier Workforce - Could this Affect Safety?

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18 November 2004: Our web-site is increasingly receiving messages about the disparity in pay which exists amongst cabin crew. Cabin crew appointed on the new contracts are now employed on temporary contracts for three years. They do not get any basic salary anymore but paid only by commission earned through sales, the number of sectors flown and some stand-by payments.

As we know from our confidential sources inside the workforce, basic pay can average £580 pounds per month – a substantial amount to be cut from the wage packet of cabin crew and some distraught employees on the new contracts have told us that their pay is now as much as 33 percent less than colleagues on the old contracts. It also forces crew to work longer hours whenever they are able and puts even more pressure on them to make sales to the passengers or charge for services.

The increasing presence of temporary cabin crew is obviously having a divisive effect on cabin crew as a whole as they are clearly undercutting those on the old contracts. Such a divided workforce is not conducive to generating safe working practices where cabin crew must essentially work as an effective team in the event of an emergency situation.

This divide and rule tactic doesn’t just stop with cabin crew. The pilots have also been subjected to the same game with up to 30 percent of the pilots now employed on contracts and this figure is expected to increase to 50 percent in the not too distant future. Again, pilots on contract work longer hours for less pay than their staff pilot colleagues.

The company has now declared to the US Securities and Exchange Commission that it intends to increase the number of staff on contracts so that they would be expected to form a larger proportion of the total workforce in future.

One aviation analyst, Chris Avery at JP Morgan has pointed to the fact that these employment practices are “not usually a recipe for harmony”. If that’s the case where does this leave safety for aviation workers and the travelling public?

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