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Ryanair tells pilots ‘take unpaid leave or move if you want to avoid Thomas Cook-style job losses’



Ryanair has doubled down on a veiled threat to cut jobs, by bringing in bankrupt Thomas Cook into an internal spat. The airline is urging its pilots to go on unpaid leave or transfer to other bases to avoid redundancies of the kind that have resulted from the travel firm’s collapse.

Ryanair – at loggerheads with its pilots over pay and benefits – wrote to pilots in a number of airports across Europe including Stansted, Manchester and Dublin on Tuesday, encouraging them to take unpaid leave lasting up to 12 months, or to apply for a job in a base with vacancies.

“With yesterday’s collapse of Thomas Cook with the loss of 9,000 jobs in the UK and potentially a further 13,000 jobs across Europe, we hope that there will be sufficient applications for unpaid leave/part-time, so we do not have to resort to job losses,” state the memos seen by The Independent.

Last week, Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary told investors the airline planned to cut between 500 and 700 pilot jobs, adding that it will move from voluntary to compulsory redundancies “very quickly”.

At the same meeting with investors, Mr O’Leary narrowly won approval for a bonus scheme that will hand him around €100m (£89m) if he meets profit and share price goals. Only 50.5 per cent of shareholders voted in favour.

Ryanair is profitable, reporting earnings of €1bn for the year ending in March, although that was the lowest figure for four years.  

Tuesday’s memos, sent by Ryanair’s director of flight operations Neal McMahon, said the respective airports have a surplus of pilots. Some of the notes also said the surplus must be reduced this winter due to delays with the delivery of Boeing Max aircraft. The Boeing 737 Max remains grounded worldwide after two fatal accidents.

The latest move by Ryanair’s bosses is likely to fuel tensions with the staff who keep its planes flying.

On Friday, when the British Airline Pilots’ Association called off five further days of strikes at the airline, it said: “The relationship between Ryanair and its pilots in the UK and elsewhere remains acrimonious.”

The airline’s relationship with its customers is also lacking, according to surveys by Which?.

Naomi Leach at the consumer organisation’s Travel magazine noted that Ryanair has finished bottom of its airline survey for six years in a row, with customers “fed up” with flight cancellations and the flouting of compensation rules.

Additional reporting by Reuters



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