P&O Ferries is not the first in UK waters to hire low-cost workers
If Grant Shapps hoped P&O Ferries would fold before his ultimatum this week and reinstate 800 sacked workers, a letter by return quickly disabused him.
Such a move, P&O Ferries’ chief executive Peter Hebblethwaite said, would lead to the company collapsing, adding the transport secretary was “ignoring the situation’s fundamental and factual realities”.
It would not be the first time a minister had done so, when it comes to the sea. While Shapps has now promised measures to tackle the actions of P&O Ferries, which dismissed all crew around the UK employed on its “British”, (but Jersey-issued) contracts, and enforce minimum wages, the government has long turned a blind eye to pay abuses.
Back in 2014, the late Bob Crow, then RMT union leader, decried the “super-exploitation of foreign nationals in the British shipping industry… a massive scandal that the political elite want to keep quiet”. The union launched protests over Condor Ferries, which sails from Portsmouth and Poole to the Channel Islands crewed from agencies abroad, which it says pay as little £2.40 an hour. (Condor did not respond to requests for comment.)
In 2017, inspections of multiple vessels from different operators working out of UK ports by the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) confirmed that paying below minimum wage was widespread.
In early 2021, when Irish Ferries announced plans to bring its low-cost crewing model to the Dover-Calais corridor, unions warned of a race to the bottom. Irish Ferries had been the forefathers of P&O axe-wielding, in 2005 sacking – albeit with consultation – hundreds of crew to replace them with foreign agency workers. Instead of acting, the RMT complained, the government “rolled out the red carpet”. (Irish
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