March 17th - P&O Ferries Fire And Rehire

Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast

The Independent

Places & Travel, Leisure, Society & Culture

3.6 • 628 Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2022

⏱️ 7 minutes

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Summary

Unions are threatening legal action against P&O Ferries after making 800 workers redundant earlier today. The company suspended its sailings after making all UK seafaring employees redundant with immediate effect. The former employees are to be replaced with cheaper agency workers in an effort to reduce the company's current annual losses of £100m. Like many transport companies, P&O Ferries suffered from a drastic reduction in passengers during the coronavirus pandemic. A spokesperson for the company said in a statement, “In its current state, P&O Ferries is not a viable business." I have come to Dover to find out how the situation unfolded for the unfortunate former staff members, and what is likely to come.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to today's travel podcast, which is coming to you from the Port of Dover.
0:08.0	Now this town doesn't always look beautiful, but this evening with the full moon over the eastern docks,
0:19.0	a calm sea, blue sky and some lovely strata of pink in the sky.
0:28.6	It looks very fetching and very restful and serene. But I'm afraid this has been a location for some terrible news for 800 seafarers,
0:42.3	both here in Dover and in the ports of Hull, in Cairn, in Larn and Liverpool.
0:50.3	These are people employed by P&O Ferries, a company owned by D.P. World, based in Dubai.
0:58.0	And around 8 o'clock this morning, I started getting messages from passengers who were
1:06.0	trying to get on their ferry to go to Calais. And they've been told, sorry, we've suspended operations for a few
1:13.7	hours. We're going to be making a major announcement. People were thinking, well, is this some kind of
1:20.8	IT hack or some other kind of failure? Some people were saying that the company was going to go bust.
1:29.0	But then, around lunchtime, we heard, or rather, we heard from workers, and I met a few today, that
1:36.7	800 of them had just been sapped. They were told, effectively, you're too expensive, we're losing 100 million pounds a
1:47.2	year, we can't afford to keep you on, we're finding agency staff who we will be able to
1:53.9	employ in much inferior terms. Now, that is shocking news for anybody to receive.
2:04.3	The company, I think, has behaved in an extraordinarily brutal manner.
2:12.7	I've been kicking around for quite some time and I've never seen anything like this.
2:17.4	Worth remembering that lots of companies have had... kicking around for quite some time and I've never seen anything like this.
2:26.1	Worth remembering that lots of companies have had a kind of fire and rehire principle during the COVID pandemic, companies like British Airways, pretty much every single worker for that
2:33.7	excellent company is on worse terms and conditions than they were two years ago.
2:39.0	But the unions were taken through this with the management all the way and negotiated the best deal they possibly could for their workers. They were prepared
2:52.5	to compromise. They were prepared to be flexible in order to preserve as many jobs as they could.
3:01.2	D.P. World has issued instructions which do not allow anything like that. They have simply said, right, that's it.
	...

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