Thread: P&O cancels services and tells ships to stay in port

Highly unusual and I wonder if the unions got wind of what it will be or they're just panicking for the sake of it?

P&O Ferries has paused its services "in preparation for a company announcement" later on Thursday.

The ferry operator said it was not going into liquidation but all ferries had been instructed to stay in port.

Union RMT urged the firm to protect jobs amid speculation that hundreds of crewmembers could "be sacked and replaced with foreign labour".

As a result some sailings scheduled for today have been cancelled, with passengers told to use other companies.

P&O services scheduled today include 14 between Dover and Calais, three between Liverpool and Dublin and seven between Larne in County Antrim and Cairnryan in Dumfries and Galloway.

The union said it has instructed members to stay on board their vessels once they have docked or risk being "locked out" of their jobs.

P&O cancels services and tells ships to stay in port - BBC News

Not going to liquidate but… damning words if there ever where some!

Bloody Brexit, its ruined peninsular and oriental

Just one branch of P&O

Well dear chap standards slipped when they were sold to the sand wogs

So the Emiratis don't want to throw GBP100m a year at a failing business.

That's very unreasonable of them.

Unions are as much to blame as P&O bosses for the ferries chaos

Ferry operator failed to handle the redundancies well, but may end up breaking the RMT’s iron grip on transport

MATTHEW LYNN
17 March 2022 • 3:53pm
Matthew Lynn

The crisis on the ferry services into and out of the UK has been brewing for years.

Ships are being held hostage in ports. Security guards have been sent on board to remove workers from their posts. Services are being suspended, and travel plans cancelled.

Over the past 24 hours, transport across the English Channel and the Irish Sea has been thrown into chaos as the ferry operator P&O fired all 800 of its sea-faring staff.

It would be easy to criticise P&O, and even more its parent company Dubai World, for that decision. In fairness, it has handled the process with spectacular crassness. And yet the militants of the RMT Union are just as much to blame as the bosses.

As long-suffering commuters on the London Underground, and the rail network, will know to their cost, the union combines a pig-headedness and complacent disregard for the customer that comes straight from the 1970s. They were always going to get their comeuppance one day – and now it seems that moment has arrived.





The crisis on the ferry services into and out of the UK has been brewing for years. It was hardly the most profitable business in the world, but during the pandemic it slumped to huge losses.

Even with services running again, and with Covid restrictions lifted and the summer holidays approaching, P&O is still expecting to lose about £100m this year. Against that backdrop, it has finally made its move against the union, dismissing its members, and hiring agency workers to replace them, presumably at far lower rates of pay, and perhaps more importantly, with far greater flexibility.


It is probably the most dramatic piece of union-busting since Rupert Murdoch moved all his newspaper titles from Fleet Street to Wapping in 1986, breaking the power of the print unions in the process.

The process has hardly been well-handled. The staff were informed over Zoom, and passengers were left in limbo, while it doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of the people running the company that the unions would simply dig in and refuse to leave the ships, nor let agency workers meant to replace them on board.

And yet, there is a problem to be solved. The RMT is the most extreme of a newly militant brand of trade union. It has virtually bankrupted the London Underground with its insistence on maintaining every job even when robots could do the work far more cheaply and efficiently, calling its members out on constant strikes even as the capital struggles to recover from the pandemic.

It has led strikes at Southeastern, on the Transpennine Express, campaigned against any cleaning jobs being outsourced, and driven rail suppliers to fire and rehire their workforces to try to clear out the union.

The chances of the RMT recognising that with working from home becoming the new normal, we will need different Tube and train services, with varying hours, re-invented working practices and fewer staff? In truth, less than zero. It opposes any form of change.


The RMT is the most extreme of a newly militant brand of trade union.

It is not just the RMT. The University and College Lecturers union has been leading its members out on strike even though everyone knows students have been through two years of terrible disruption and many universities may no longer be financially viable post-pandemic.

Teaching unions threatened strike action at schools last year. The Public and Commercial Services Union has been leading workers at the DVLA on strike even with a critical backlog of driving tests to deal with.

Unite has been organising industrial action by bin workers at councils such as Coventry, and threatening action by baggage handlers at Luton Airport, while Unison workers in Glasgow have voted to strike over equal pay. And that is just in the last month or so. The list goes on and on.

In reality, after two decades of waning union power following the Thatcher reforms of the 1980s, the trade unions are starting to return to 1970s levels of militancy. Overwhelming in the cosseted public sector, or a handful of protected monopolies, they instinctively resist change, provoke disputes, and stir up unrest, often motivated more by a hard-left political agenda than any real concern for the workforce.

Industrial relations shouldn’t be this hard. Managers should be able to sit down with staff, explain that there will have to be redundancies, make them voluntary where possible, and well-compensated when not, and agree on a plan that can keep the business profitable.

The RMT won’t countenance that, and neither, increasingly, will many other unions. Companies are left with no options than bankruptcy or confrontation.

P&O may not have handled the matter well. But if it breaks the power of the RMT, the result will be the secure, profitable ferry network an island nation needs - and quite a few commuters will be quietly cheering them on.



Unions are as much to blame as P&O bosses for the ferries chaos

the unions should have some regard for the 2000 or so workers not made redundant by dubai world, without being able to outsource the 800 jobs, the company may, if dubai world are to be believed, go under with the loss of another 2000 jobs.

perhaps those made redundant should take the pragmatic view, understand that times have changed and sign on as contract workers for p&o, thereby keeping their jobs albeit under different conditions and pay, but they are to be offered an enhanced redundancy package with extra compensation, whilst union general secretary mick lynch, who once said 'all I want from life is a bit of socialism', collects a package worth some £124,886...... nice work if you can get it!

in short, fuck intransigent unions stuck in the 1970's such as rmt and kudos for dubai world for standing up to them, just a shame so many workers, who are always pawns in the power struggles between the unions and the employers, have to be treated like this.

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

So the Emiratis

want to do business in the UK, Dubai Ports have taken tax payers furlough cash and have decided to make a monumental clusterfuk of managing the "financial" problem they say they are having. Well lets watch this space. Incidentally the French workers weren't treated in the manner their UK counterparts have been.

^^ I guessed that one was from the Torygraph even before clicking on the Link

Both sides are guilty of allowing this to happen without the usual precondition of consultation. Having said that, I’m not sure we would wish to endure the levels of power exercised by our French counterparts.

Like everything else in the world, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, those involved are subject to the global influences we have accepted as the price for living in global community. The current pandemic has done nothing to assuage the powers assumed by global participation!

Originally Posted by sabang

^^ I guessed that one was from the Torygraph even before clicking on the Link

It really is unmitigated horseshit.

Union to blame because the owners wanted to sack 800 without notice and, for some unfathomable reason, they didn't discuss the idea with the union.

Tax is so, so typical of the 'I'm Alright Jack' tory rump.

People tend to forget that if it weren't for unions, workers in the US/UK would still be working 7 days a week without any health benefits or overtime pay. The standard of living and opportunities that we and our parents and grandparents enjoy is not because of the generosity of the business owners, it is because our great-grandparents and grandparents fought for the right to be paid a living wage and work in a safe environment.

The struggles of the working class were so long ago that many people have become complacent and are slowly letting companies like P&O or Amazon chip away at the rights that our ancestors fought for.

^ Up to a point, yes I agree. However, if the unions strangle a company such that it is unable to employ talent, unable to be flexible with overtime, and ultimately unable to make a profit then the company folds and everyone loses.

One only has to look at the UK car industry debacle to see how unions need to negotiate for the benefit of the company and employees rather than just the latter.

Originally Posted by cyrille

It really is unmitigated horseshit.

Union to blame because the owners wanted to sack 800 without notice and, for some unfathomable reason, they didn't discuss the idea with the union.

Tax is so, so typical of the 'I'm Alright Jack' tory rump.

see troys post above.

it is not the 1930's any more when workers really needed the protection of rottweiller like unions because there were no laws to protect them.
times have changed and workers are now well protected from the excesses of rapacious employers. these sackings were unlawful, and compensation will be paid, but if the company accounts are to be believed then without the sackings or redundancies then another 2000 would lose their jobs because the company would fold. if a companys wage bill is too high then cuts need to be made. its economics 101. where the cuts are made is up to the company, but no owner is going to sack himself before his workers is he. thats life. as unfair as it has always been.

the rmt are no angels either and their intransigent marxist agenda is causing havoc in london. not all jobs can be protected, and the rmt are pricing their members out of the market. its an unfair world, there are no easy answers and those at the bottom will suffer, just as they always have.

Originally Posted by cyrille

Union to blame because the owners wanted to sack 800 without notice and, for some unfathomable reason, they didn't discuss the idea with the union.

Not only that, they sent in the heavies with handcuff to forcibly drag staff off the vessels, the whole thing smacks of a little prince in Dubai having a tantrum and shouting out orders to make it happen. I hope the UK Govt goes to town on the cvnts.

P&O's owner has made Britain's most militant union look like the good guys


Even if its mass sacking was within the law, no company can afford to behave with such crass insensitivity

JEREMY WARNER

19 March 2022 • 12:00pm
Jeremy Warner

Congratulations DP World, owner of P&O Ferries, which has succeeded where all others have failed in making the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), arguably Britain’s most militant and disruptive trade union, seem like the good guys.

It’s quite an achievement; this is a union whose repeated strikes on the rail network and London Underground, causing widespread misery, make it one of the most hated institutions in the land.

Yet there’s no doubt where public sympathies lie on this one; given the chance, UK citizens would throw open their doors to our dispossessed seafarers as gladly as they are for the influx of Ukrainian refugees, driven from their homes by Putin’s murderous invasion. DP World has almost irredeemably blackened its own name.

It is rare in this day and age to see a management mishandle a supposedly justified piece of cost cutting quite as spectacularly as this.

To say that it is a public relations disaster, inflicting no end of costly reputational damage on a company which claims already to be barely viable, is an understatement. Political pressure to return the £15m in furlough and other public funds received during the pandemic is just the half of it; the freeport status of two of the parent company’s UK ports is also under threat.

What could they have been thinking? To announce in the most brutal of terms, via video, that all existing crews are to be fired with immediate effect; that said crews are to be frogmarched off their ships by security men; that they are going to be replaced by cheaper, and largely foreign agency workers – it beggars belief and completely undermines any legitimate case there might be for the actions taken.


There are no rights and wrongs about the way this was done. Even if not illegal under the law, no corporation can afford to behave with such crass insensitivity. One can only assume DP World did so because this is the way it acts in its home town of Dubai, where there are no unions to speak of and very limited protections for the semi-enslaved foreign labour used to keep the desert kingdom functional.

DP World’s high command seems to have forgotten a basic tenet of the multinational corporation’s modus operandi; think global, act local. In this case, exactly the opposite approach has been adopted, with the local norms of a developing country imposed on an advanced economy. Its actions seem to epitomise all that’s wrong with today’s globalised world, thereby disastrously lending cod legitimacy to anti-globalist, protectionist voices.

Since the company appears disinclined to defend its actions in any meaningful way, or even spell out what it is trying to achieve, let me speculate on some possible explanations.

Merchant seamen have a long tradition of “closed shop” union militancy in Britain dating right back to the foundation of the National Amalgamated Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union in the late 19th century. In 1966, the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, had to impose a state of national emergency when a strike of seafarers threatened to bring the whole country to its knees.

Severe disruption to international trade greatly added to an already destabilising balance of payments crisis, creating a run on the pound that eventually culminated in Wilson’s notorious “pound in your pocket” devaluation. It wasn’t until Margaret Thatcher arrived on the scene at the end of the 1970s, determined to break the power of the unions, that the cycle of decline was broken.


Many of the union reforms enacted by her Government have since been eroded. More difficult economic times threaten a return to union militancy, especially in key public infrastructure and services where it can inflict ruinous damage.

But it is not as if this particular dispute is about unacceptable union behaviour. Despite the RMT’s fearsome reputation for activism, it is hard to recall any significant seamen’s strike in a very long time.

That’s partly because the fleet has moved almost wholly offshore. Agency staffing of the type that P&O is trying to introduce to its domestic ferry operations is in fact the international norm in much of the industry. Shipping is today as globalised in the way it organises its affairs as the world it services. That goes as much for its labour practices as the legion of nationalities that crew its vessels.

As I understand it, the intention is to replace the four heavily unionised crews that staff each ship with just two un-unionised crews of agency workers, substantially drawn from the much cheaper labour markets of EU accession states. Brexit, it would seem, has done little to prevent this kind of backdoor free movement of labour. In any case, it brings the P&O ferry operation back into line with standard practice elsewhere in much international shipping.

So why not go through the normal process of consultation and persuasion that is the modern way with big restructurings? The answer seems to be that P&O believed it pointless negotiating with a union as strongly opposed to change as the RMT, and thought that to do so would only add to the disruption to trade and travel that current actions have brought about.

Nonetheless, the result of the stealth approach adopted is that the company gets the blame for the consequent chaos, not the union. One local Labour MP calls it “predatory capitalism”, and it is hard to disagree. Our dwindling band of native seamen are having their jobs seemingly stolen from them.

As a then still young journalist working at The Times, I had direct experience of a similarly brutal approach to “modernisation” when Rupert Murdoch overnight relocated his newspaper operations to Wapping, leaving the print unions high and dry. Having to cross a screaming picket line of sacked former colleagues was a miserable experience, but I did it nonetheless because the behaviour of the unions in steadfastly refusing much needed reform had been so appalling.

Nor could there be any possible justification for the “Spanish practices” then prevalent, many of them not just morally and operationally indefensible but outright corrupt.

Yet P&O is not quite the same thing. The substitute workers at Wapping tended to be perfectly nice people from much the same background as their sacked predecessors, only previously they had been locked out of such jobs by monopolistic print unions.

I don’t really see the same level of defensive protectionism with the crews who up until this week used to staff P&O Ferries. Certainly they cannot be blamed for the losses incurred as a result of the pandemic, which by the way pale to insignificance set alongside those of many other travel and freight operators.

All companies need to move with the times, but it is hard to imagine Lord Sterling, who once used to head the wider P&O group and did much to modernise the UK fleet in the 1980s and 1990s, behaving in this way.

That’s not to say he wouldn’t have done it, only that he would have done it very differently.

P&O's owner has made Britain's most militant union look like the good guys

Originally Posted by cyrille

It really is unmitigated horseshit.

Union to blame because the owners wanted to sack 800 without notice and, for some unfathomable reason, they didn't discuss the idea with the union.

Tax is so, so typical of the 'I'm Alright Jack' tory rump.

yeah, how dare the owners want to make a profit… they should just run at a 100m loss per year for eternity.

Originally Posted by cyrille

It really is unmitigated horseshit.

Union to blame because the owners wanted to sack 800 without notice and, for some unfathomable reason, they didn't discuss the idea with the union.

Tax is so, so typical of the 'I'm Alright Jack' tory rump.

yet another showstopper from teak doors performing flea.

Originally Posted by DrWilly

yeah, how dare the owners want to make a profit… they should just run at a 100m loss per year for eternity.

Lets see how that looks when the RMT has their day in court, using European* employment rights to wring as compensation as possible out of the owners.

*The same employment rights that Boris claimed would be swept away but are still on the statute books.


The Observer view on P&O deserving to face justice for sacking its staff | Observer editorial | The Guardian


P&O Ferries told it could face unlimited fine if sackings unlawful | P&O Ferries | The Guardian

The same employment rights that Boris claimed would be swept away but are still on the statute books.

nothing to do with boris. p & o moved the registration of the vessels in its english channel operating fleet to cyprus ahead of brexit, in part to keep its tax arrangements inside the bloc, i would guess that the employee contracts also comply with eu regulations.

As far as I am aware, there has been no derogation from EU employment law post Brexit by the Brexitory party. If there is change and it materially affects UK's trading status with the Continent to its perceived detriment then that would be a possible breach of the Agreement and sanctions could ensue.
Nope, it's simply a case of camel jockey owners taking the piss.

Civil Servants......

Officials failed to challenge P&O firings

Whitehall officials tried to justify P&O Ferries’ sacking of 800 workers by telling ministers it would “ensure that they remain a key player in the UK market for years to come through restructuring”, a leaked memo shows.

The briefing document shows the Department for Transport failed to challenge the company’s decision to dismiss crew members with immediate effect, possibly in breach of employment law.

Written by a senior official, it was shared across the government, including with the prime minister’s private office, before P&O told staff in a video recording on Thursday that it was their final day at the company.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/officials-failed-to-challenge-p-amp-o-firings-mv06ldsv9

The thing is, civil servants are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

The stupid and ignorant are always castigating civil servants for obstructing ministers etc.,etc., but in truth they generally strive to align their advice with the prevailing ethos of the government of the day. Treat 'em mean and strip the fat away to keep it lean is music to the Tory ear so give them what they want. Can't blame them, can you. Reducing labour costs to maximise profits is grist to the Tory mill.

The briefing paper for Labour with their MPs in port constituencies and a commitment to bolstering indigenous workforces would have been obviously different.

Yes, minister.