Originally Posted by Reuters

DUBLIN (Reuters) - Ryanair on Friday announced that it would recognize pilot unions for the first time in its 32-year history in a bid to stop the first pilot strike in its history from taking place later in the day.

Originally Posted by Irish Times

In a landmark move, the airline said it had written to the pilot unions in Ireland, Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal inviting each of them to talks to recognise these unions as the representative body for pilots in Ryanair in each of these countries.

“Ryanair will now change its long-standing policy of not recognising unions in order to avoid any threat of disruption to its customers and its flights from pilot unions during Christmas week,” the company said.

The airline said it would recognise the unions on condition they establish “committees of Ryanair pilots” to deal with issues, noting the company would not engage with pilots who fly for competitor airlines in Ireland or elsewhere

Originally Posted by Ryanair

Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary said:

“Christmas flights are very important to our customers and we wish to remove any worry or concern that they may be disrupted by pilot industrial action next week.

If the best way to achieve this is to talk to our pilots through a recognised union process, then we are prepared to do so, and we have written today to these unions inviting them to talks to recognise them and calling on them to cancel the threatened industrial action planned for Christmas week.

Recognising unions will be a significant change for Ryanair, but we have delivered radical change before, most recently when we launched Ryanair Labs and our highly successful Always Getting Better customer improvement programme in 2013.

Putting the needs of our customers first, and avoiding disruption to their Christmas flights, is the reason why we will now deal with our pilots through recognised national union structures and we hope and expect that these structures can and will be agreed with our pilots early in the New Year.”

Originally Posted by CPH-Flyer

I wonder what this will mean to the structure and viability of Ryanair long term.

Originally Posted by WorldLux

Viability wise, they'll probably increase prices and still survive just fine. FWIW it would be great for Ryanair to adopt Southwest Airlines current model, i.e. being more customer friendly. I find their 2 checked-bags + drink on board quite nice. The constant sale pitch on Ryanair flights is just annoying.