Maybe the situation is more like this:
- IE law enables company to
not accept union recognition, provided an alterantive is established;
- Ryanair established an alternative in form of using ERC, each ERC representing a local base of few employees and dealing directly with management regarding contracts;
- Due to low employee count, due established contractor working arrangements, only a small number of voters are required to accept any deal offered by the company;
- All ERC offers from company are "take it or leave it", either accept the deal on the table we are 'kind enough' to offer or get nothing instead;
- There is NO bargaining, just the above "take it or leave it";
- Few employees in each base are desperate to retain their 5/4 roster and thus will vote for any deal on table which alternatively may upset their home life;
In practice, based on information freely available in these forums, lets see how this would work:
Let us assume a vote in a base of 4 aircraft, at 5.2 pilots per aircraft thus 21 pilots for each function in the base, only half the captains have contracts, so 10 are allowed to vote, one of which is a management representative pilot, of these 10 2 pilots abstain from voting as they are not happy to vote on the deal offered or are on annual leave or similar when voting takes place and thus not consulted, the remaining are split 3 yes/5 no, the company then adds the 2 non voters to the yes vote to make it 5/5 and accepts the deal for the base...
3 people in this sample are voting in favour and accepted a 'deal' for all 22 pilots in the local base workforce, do the maths...
Is there however a bargaining scenario when this is how ERC system works, me thinks not
The original decision must be revisited as there clearly is a discrepancy in the ERC setup of what a collective bargaining system should look like. It works in favour of company in all scenarios.
Currently it appears from the press that multiple local ERC representatives of the pilot body across EU/UK are wanting to join forces to collectively address the company offer and terms & conditions, to ensure a common set of conditions for all employees, to ensure similar conditions and terms are available to all and transparent to see when required to change base. Clearly it is not in the interest of the company to engage with multiple bases at once as it would give their advantage away which currently serves them so well using their established "divide and conquer" techniques, by giving each base a little less than others for no reason, then attempting to put out positive news that base ABC has accepted a new deal by negotiation to persuade other bases to follow suit.
