Securing collective representation in non‐union European multinational companies: The case of Ryanair pilots’ (partial) success

Compelling a recalcitrant employer to cede its staff independent collective representation has always been a fraught and difficult exercise. It is an inordinately more complex task when that employer is a multinational company that is capable of moving its operations from one country to another with relative ease. For workers to be successful, requires that they and their representatives coordinate their organizing and mobilizing activities across national boundaries in a manner that they have rarely been able to achieve. This inductive study examines one such rare example – Ryanair – and investigates the basis for its pilots’, albeit partial, success. Its contribution is the explication of a causal model that identifies a set of institutional and structural conditions, and agentic actions that led Ryanair to cede its staff union representation, while also pointing to the limitations of the pilots’ ‘victory’. It ends by identifying a number of changes to Europe's institutional and regulatory architecture that, if enacted, could help the workers of resolutely anti‐union MNEs secure recognition for unitary pan‐European structures of representation.