The decision by Ryanair’s chief executive, Michael O’Leary, to suddenly reverse decades of policy and recognise pilot unions for the first time is a good thing. For Mr O’Leary, who has never complained about being seen as a foul-mouthed bully, it is a welcome recognition that bulldozing your way through workers’ rights to make money doesn’t always work. Rather than attempt to break a strike by cockpit crew over Christmas, he has folded like a paper plane. It will probably mean the billion-pound profits of Mr O’Leary’s snarling creation will be now be a little more fairly shared. Mr O’Leary is not yet on the road to Damascus, but he could find it by recognising the rights of other workers to join trade unions and collectively bargain for better pay and conditions.

In some ways the airline industry is a vivid example of what has happened in the wider economy. Competition and liberalisation has increased the number of routes, opened up destinations and in many cases lowered air fares. However, it has also led to layoffs, salary reductions and less favourable employment contracts. Profits boomed as working conditions deteriorated. If one aggregates similar experiences across different sectors, it’s clear what’s going wrong: precarious part-time work has grown, retirement is pushed back and average wages have flatlined. This process has been accelerated in the last 40 years by laws that have undermined unions while corporate power has grown.

Trade unions historically provided a method of transferring gains from capital to ordinary workers. However, in the UK they have never seemed so shrunken: membership has fallen by almost half since the late 1970s. Since the 2008 crisis – despite the squeeze in the public sector, where trade union members are concentrated – the number of working days lost to strikes has been lower, each year, than in any year between 1900 and 1990. Meanwhile, bosses think raising pay is antithetical to sound practice. It is wrong to assume that collective bargaining is incompatible with a modern economy. Employment laws need modernising. Unions face a hostile environment but need to change too. The lack of a creative response to the post-crisis surge in self-employment and the emergence of the gig-economy workforce is telling. The success of the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain is the exception, not the rule. Yet public opinion is going trade unions’ way. They must channel it for their members’ – and society’s – benefit.