Low-cost airline Ryanair is reportedly demanding that some flight attendants in Spain repay the company thousands of dollars in wages they have earned since a new collective bargaining agreement was implemented last year.
According to a Spanish labor union, Ryanair is demanding flight attendants repay between €1,500 and €3,000 (US $1,690 and $3,375) in wages that were paid between October 2024 and March 2025.
In order to avoid paying the bill, as well as the ability to earn higher wages and more vacation time going forward, the flight attendants must join a rival labor union that negotiated the agreement with Ryanair.
The dispute can be traced back to last summer when the CCOO union, which is Spain’s largest union, negotiated a collective bargaining agreement for Ryanair cabin crew based in Spain.
Unlike in some countries, cabin crew in Spain don’t have to join one specific union, and in this case, some flight attendants were members of a rival union known as USO.
The USO challenged the agreement that Ryanair had reached with the CCOO and ended up taking the airline to court. In what should have been considered a significant win for the USO union, in March, Spain’s High Court ruled that the bargaining agreement wasn’t valid.
The aim of the lawsuit appears to have been to force Ryanair to enter into joint bargaining with both the CCOO and the USO, but the airline has, instead, complied with the court’s ruling by applying the collective bargaining agreement to CCOO members only.
Last month, the USO union warned that Ryanair could “retaliate” against its members by demanding the wage increases they had applied during the time that the agreement was applied to all Spanish flight attendants regardless of their union membership.
“The agreement was signed without prior consultation with the workforce, applied unilaterally and, now, the damage is for the workers, who are being asked to return money they do not have,” slammed Raquel Bautista, head of USO-Ryanair.
“A masterstroke that they want to use to wipe USO off the Ryanair union map after years of winning rulings and keep only their union of trust,” Bautista continued.
On Monday, trusted news organization Reuters reported that cabin crew belonging to USO had now started to receive letters from Ryanair demanding they repay the wage increases.
One cabin crew had reportedly received an even bigger bill than had first been envisioned and has been asked to repay €3,857 ($4,337).
In order to keep the wage rises they’ve already earned since October 2024 and continue earning the higher rate of pay, cabin crew have been told they will have to join the CCOO union.
In response, a spokesperson for Ryanair provided the following statement: “USO are complaining about pay cuts that result from their court case.”
“Ryanair is complying with the court case that USO took to cut pay while it is under appeal. USO are a tiny minority union with no support from our crew, the vast majority of whom have their pay and conditions protected by an agreement with CCOO.”
What do you think of this dispute? Should cabin crew be forced to pay back these pay rises?
