Easily done when you can literally ship workers from the third world to do the job for you.
Why bother to hire a local when you can bring people from across the globe to work for peanuts. This is in action across our entire economy
It’s easy for them. Fire most of their workforce. Replace with a workforce that can be paid less then the UK minimum wage via loopholes. Threaten to sack if they get uppity.
The maritime industry is a disaster for Britain and westerners in general.
I worked on board a general cargo vessel. The crew were Philippino and worked for about a quarter of the wage I was on and did 9 month stints onboard and 3 months off.
We all got fired and replaced by Russians who work for even less.
I love the endless talk from Conservatives, and now Reform as well, about “making work pay”. Yet clearly in the last 15 years at best it seems like nothing has substantially changed on that front. Next to no enforcement of working rights and the most limp-wristed slap for any company found acting like cunts. Did anything ever happen to P&O over their fire & rehire or did that get memory-holed as well?
They’ve had 0 repercussions for sacking hundreds of workers and replacing them with cheap foreign labour. I’m not sure that’s actually the news, the real news is the government has not done anything about it in the 2 YEARS since.
They should call up ITV to make a TV show and no doubt the Tories will magically find some fucks.
They literally fired everyone and then rehired them for less than they used to get paid. I think at this point we can accept that maybe p&o aren’t the arbiters of morality we’d expect of such a large organisation.
> Grant Shapps, who was the UK’s transport secretary when P&O fired its workers in March 2022, had promised to legislate to improve pay for cross-Channel ferry workers. At the time he accused the ferry company of operating like “pirates of the high sea” and wrote to the company to state: “This government will not stand by while the requirement to treat seafarers with due respect and fairness is brazenly ignored.”
Except that’s exactly what they did and what everyone -including P&O- knew that they would do.
P&O are absolute scum for that and UK government twice as bad for allowing it.
As a merchant mariner it disgusts me this was allowed to happen. Would never in a million years book one of their ferries or workforce them and shame on anyone who does
Yup, scumbag company, fired their entire staff to hire contractors they could pay slave wages. For this reason I now only ever use DFDS when coming and going from Europe even if it is more expensive.
9 comments
Easily done when you can literally ship workers from the third world to do the job for you.
Why bother to hire a local when you can bring people from across the globe to work for peanuts. This is in action across our entire economy
It’s easy for them. Fire most of their workforce. Replace with a workforce that can be paid less then the UK minimum wage via loopholes. Threaten to sack if they get uppity.
The maritime industry is a disaster for Britain and westerners in general.
I worked on board a general cargo vessel. The crew were Philippino and worked for about a quarter of the wage I was on and did 9 month stints onboard and 3 months off.
We all got fired and replaced by Russians who work for even less.
I love the endless talk from Conservatives, and now Reform as well, about “making work pay”. Yet clearly in the last 15 years at best it seems like nothing has substantially changed on that front. Next to no enforcement of working rights and the most limp-wristed slap for any company found acting like cunts. Did anything ever happen to P&O over their fire & rehire or did that get memory-holed as well?
They’ve had 0 repercussions for sacking hundreds of workers and replacing them with cheap foreign labour. I’m not sure that’s actually the news, the real news is the government has not done anything about it in the 2 YEARS since.
They should call up ITV to make a TV show and no doubt the Tories will magically find some fucks.
They literally fired everyone and then rehired them for less than they used to get paid. I think at this point we can accept that maybe p&o aren’t the arbiters of morality we’d expect of such a large organisation.
> Grant Shapps, who was the UK’s transport secretary when P&O fired its workers in March 2022, had promised to legislate to improve pay for cross-Channel ferry workers. At the time he accused the ferry company of operating like “pirates of the high sea” and wrote to the company to state: “This government will not stand by while the requirement to treat seafarers with due respect and fairness is brazenly ignored.”
Except that’s exactly what they did and what everyone -including P&O- knew that they would do.
P&O are absolute scum for that and UK government twice as bad for allowing it.
As a merchant mariner it disgusts me this was allowed to happen. Would never in a million years book one of their ferries or workforce them and shame on anyone who does
Yup, scumbag company, fired their entire staff to hire contractors they could pay slave wages. For this reason I now only ever use DFDS when coming and going from Europe even if it is more expensive.