Airline staff in two of Europe's largest aviation markets, Italy and Spain, are threatening Ryanair with industrial action.

The staff are being represented by the International Transport Worker's Federation (ITF) which said it was reacting to Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary's "aggressive reactions" to attempts by staff to organise themselves into trade unions.

In Italy the airline's workers are refusing to sell non-essential "extras" such as hot drinks, food, and alcohol.

They claim this is a reaction to Ryanair's attempts to transfer staff members who were appointed as trade union organisers for the first time.

The federation said the Italian staff were using this tactic because these items contributed so much to the company's profits. A statement said: "Workers are protesting after they joined a union to represent them, only to have Ryanair refuse to talk to a third party and try to transfer the staff their colleagues had nominated as their union representatives."

In Spain ground handling staff will be taking strike action from October 16th, culminating in a 24 hour strike on October 23rd. This follows what their union described as the company "persistently ignoring negotiated agreements", issues over union membership, "and even statutory requirements". Ingo Marowsky, secretary of the ITF's Civil Aviation Section, claimed: "Discontent is never far from the surface at Ryanair, where workers feel mistrusted, marginalised and mistreated."

He said Ryanair was going to have to either accept the consequences or learn to behave like "any other normal, civilised, twenty-first century employer".

The ITF has set up a special website where Ryanair workers can share experiences about working at the company. This tactic is similar to that used by pilots in the Republic and Britain over recent years.

The situation in Spain and Italy comes at a time when Ryanair is attempting to gain majority control of Aer Lingus. So far it has only managed to get a 19.2 per cent stake, but it is understood to be examining ideas to improve on its original €2.80 a share offer. An offer document is expected to be issued either this week or early next week.

Unions yesterday raised the issue of the attempted takeover of Aer Lingus.

"With this kind of reaction to Michael O'Leary's tactics it is no surprise that O'Leary's attempted takeover of Aer Lingus has been greeted with such opposition," said an ITF spokesman.

Some 681 unions representing 4,500,000 transport workers in 148 countries are members of the ITF.