A showdown between hardheaded corporate culture and the Scandinavian ideal of consensus and equity comes to a head this weekend as Ryanair prepares to pull out of Denmark to avoid a trade union blockade.

On Friday night Ryanair is due to close its base at Billund airport, which brings flocks of visitors to the nearby Legoland theme park, an hour before unions plan to launch a full-scale boycott of the airline over its refusal to adapt to Denmark’s generous working conditions.

Since introducing a service to Copenhagen this spring, Ryanair has come under sustained attack from unions and officials who have accused it of violating workers’ rights in the country. On occasion the war of words has spilled over into a slanging match in the press and social media.

After Copenhagen’s mayor banned city employees from using the airline because its low wages amounted to “social dumping”, the airline issued a crudely Photoshopped image of the mayor as Marie Antoinette, saying “Let them eat cake!” and “Let them pay high fares!”

Ryanair (@Ryanair) Here are the Low Fares #Copenhagen's High Fare Mayor @FrankJensenKBH doesn't want you to book! http://t.co/4qBo0gtRof pic.twitter.com/OOF6dDYrY3

The Social Democrat MP Peter Hummelgaard hit back with an equally vulgar image of Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary apparently in an intimate entanglement with one of his jets, under the slogan: “Ryanair: screwing over its staff since 1985.”

After Ryanair held a press conference in Copenhagen last week at which some of its pilots praised their working conditions, unions claimed they were not on the same contracts as most Ryanair staff, who are paid worse. Other Ryanair workers went to the media with claims that in some months their wages were as low as €500 (£348), or less than half the salaries of local low-cost airlines.

“This was shocking to the public that this could be happening in our backyard,” said Anders Mark Jensen, vice-president of the Flight Personnel Union, which organises pilots and cabin crew in Denmark.

“Ryanair’s style is management by fear,” said Morten Windeløv, a Ryanair pilot from 2007-2011, and now a leading voice in the unions’ campaign to persuade the airline to negotiate. “There is a widespread disdain for employees, you are not treated with trust or respect as an individual – irrespective of whether you are a pilot or cabin crew. I cannot comprehend that you can be treated like that.”

Staff are ordered where to work and when to take holidays, and are under pressure to meet targets to sell merchandise, he claimed. Pilots compete to save fuel, with their performance disclosed in the crewroom for all their colleagues to see. “Competition at its worst in my opinion,” Windeløv said.

In response to the unions’ allegations, Ryanair, which is Europe’s largest airline in terms of the number of passengers, said: “We don’t comment on false or secondhand claims made by former pilots. The fact that Ryanair has a waiting list of over 5,000 pilots and cabin crew who wish to join speaks for itself.”

The unions won a legal battle last month when a labour tribunal ruled that they could take sympathy industrial action against the airline anywhere in the country, even though the unions have no members among Ryanair staff. By withdrawing its bases from the country, however, Ryanair would make any such action illegal – the carrier will continue to fly in and out of Danish airports, but with planes and staff based in Britain, Lithuania and Ireland. Its Danish staff are being relocated.

Peter Hummelgaard (@PHummelgaard) Ryanair har de sidste par dage angrebet @FrankJensenKBH med platte reklamer. Vi har lavet et ligeså plat modsvar :) pic.twitter.com/VJkPpTFNQ3

Transport union 3F, which represents the ground staff, asked an external consultancy to compare working conditions at Ryanair with those of other airlines in Denmark. It concluded that the disposable income of Ryanair employees is 23,000 kroner (about £2,150), or 15%, lower annually for a cabin attendant.

Unions claim the research shows that an extra 37 kroner – or £3.45, roughly half the price of a packet of cigarettes – on each ticket would be enough to pay for decent working conditions and a collective agreement that would uphold custom and practice in relations between unions and business in Denmark.

The Irish discount carrier’s reputation has gone steeply downhill in Denmark this year, and the company is solidly in last place in YouGov surveys of corporate reputation.

However, in this battle between price and principle, customers are apparently indifferent. A poll this week suggested more Danes would choose Ryanair today than before the dispute with the unions broke out.

Ryanair says it does not negotiate with unions because for 30 years its people have preferred to negotiate directly with the company. The dispute in Denmark demonstrates that “the Danish model cannot be applied” to the airline industry, it says.

“We did not expect the sea of negative publicity and the fact that nobody would give us a fair hearing in Denmark,” O’Leary told the Danish newspaper Berlingske in June. “If we sign a collective agreement with the Danish unions, we will then be asked to sign 15 French collective agreements, 55 Spanish collective agreements and a lot of Italian collective agreements. We are not going to do that.”

The unions say that if Ryanair carries out its threat to abandon its last base in the country on Friday night, they will welcome its return to Denmark – but only if the airline agrees to negotiate.

“Our campaign is not to put Ryanair in a bad situation – we are always saying welcome, but please sign a collective agreement with us so we can have fair competition with the other airlines,” Jensen, of the Flight Personnel Union, said. “We don’t want a Ryanair society in Denmark, we won’t let them export it here.”