March 18th - More From Dover
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 18 March 2022
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In a sudden announcement yesterday, P&O Ferries made 800 of its UK seafaring staff redundant. The British shipping company plans to replace the former employees with cheaper agency workers in an effort to reduce its losses of £100m year-on-year. Union representatives have threatened legal action against the company and advised those affected to carry out sit-in protests against the job cuts. As the holiday period approaches, I give my opinion of what might be to come.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the final independent travel podcast of the week. |
| 0:05.0 | I'm Simon Calder and thank you for joining me. |
| 0:08.0 | As you can perhaps see, I'm by the seaside once again. |
| 0:12.0 | It's been an absolutely gorgeous day from a weather point of view here at Dover. |
| 0:20.0 | The tide has gone out a little. |
| 0:23.1 | There's a couple of ships just coming in. |
| 0:25.8 | First one is GFDS from Calais and just a short way behind that. |
| 0:31.1 | Irish ferries sailing in. |
| 0:33.1 | They are coming into the eastern dock, the as it were, business end of the port over to my right. |
| 0:40.0 | It's a very different scene. |
| 0:42.1 | The cruise terminal, which normally would be empty at this time of year, because with the greatest |
| 0:46.3 | respect to the fine British climate, you don't get that many cruises calling in. |
| 0:50.8 | Well, you've got three ships tied up. |
| 0:53.0 | They are giant P& O ferries and they are |
| 0:56.6 | going nowhere at the moment. That of course is because the shock news on Thursday was that, well, |
| 1:05.4 | we learnt that they had decided that they could not afford to continue to sustain the losses they were making |
| 1:13.6 | and therefore they were sacking all their stuff and taking on workers who they can employ more cheaply, |
| 1:22.6 | which a lot of people have said was pretty brutal and I would have to agree with that. |
| 1:31.2 | So what does this mean? What is going to happen to P&O Ferries? |
| 1:36.0 | What is happening to the staff? |
| 1:38.7 | Well, my personal view, and I can well be wrong, I am so very often, is that P&O will revoke what they |
| 1:50.5 | have done. I very much hope so. I think this is a kind of series of disasters that probably |
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