P&O sailings suspended this morning
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P&O Ferries said on Thursday that the decision to lay-off 800 workers was "tough" but said the business would not be viable without "making swift and significant changes now".
It said: "We have made a £100m loss year-on-year, which has been covered by our parent DP World. This is not sustainable. Without these changes there is no future for P&O Ferries."
In other news.... https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/dubai-owned-po-paid-shareholders-270m-dividend-before-mass-sacking-316674/
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If it wasn't sustainable then it's unlikely to be sustainable going forward. UK gov has paid into this company and helped keep it afloat, pardon the pun.. I did a quick calculation, 800 jobs at X amount of guessed salary per annum, your guess is as good as mine but even the new salaries may not make this viable. It all seems strange, no doubt we'll hear more.
I looked at the newspaper headlines and smiled at the Matt cartoon but also I feel sorry for all those affected.
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Lose the £170.
JK
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I’m not sure if it happened but P&O had plans to move its fleet registrations from Dover to Limassol. It was claimed to be a response to Brexit for ‘operational and accounting’ reasons. Limassol is a flag of convenience thus avoiding UK employment and other regulations?
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Well that is exactly what we have decided to do. Cost of cancelling our ferry will be about £180.
It will inconvenience us more than the cost as I will have to build in stopovers but I cannot in all honesty support a company that treats its employees, whose hands I place my safety in, with such disdain.
I'll never sail P&O again whilst this lot own it.
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I object to the way the redundancies were handled in a very crass manner but- when Irish ferries started it was reported they operated a non union, cheap service. They now run 10 sailings a day - where has there business come from? Undercutting P & O no doubt. Change was necessary and the unions must have been able to see that a week on and a week off, in this day and age, was not sustainable. They have let their members down not negotiating competitive contracts.
all those people who are not going to travel with P & O are severely restricting their options.0 -
Brittany use French crew and sail under the French flag. I wish people would stop calling these "redundancies" - this is when your job ceases to exist. It's not a redundancy when the job continues but the current employee is sacked and replaced with someone else.
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P and O routes were run by British Railways ,Then Townsend Thorison before P and O
I agree the way it was done is going to cost the company millions in unfair dismissal claims as UK employment laws have been ignored
Do the Ferries sail under the red ensign most if not all their other ships have non English crews and sail under other flags
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"I wish people would stop calling these "redundancies" - this is when your job ceases to exist. It's not a redundancy when the job continues but the current employee is sacked and replaced with someone else."
I agree, however, if the P&O lawyers are smart they will have thought this through. In my previous roles for economic reasons I was forced to make "jobs" redundant but in effect all we did was change the job title e.g. if you have a guy earning £60k as a software developer but you had younger guys capable of doing the same job earning £30k, for economic reasons you got rid of the expensive guy and changed the job title to e.g. computer sofware engineer.
These sorts of redundancies were quite common in the offshore oil and gas sector where everything was governed by the price for oil and gas on the international markets.
to change job titles of 800 men is not going to be easy, but you can be creative, so e.g. most of the crew become just seaman instead of bosons etc, captains, navigators etc become senior ships officers, shocking state of affairs especially if you look at the dividends that have been paid out and the money spent on sponsering events etc. When i was made redundant at the age of 64, i remember my lovely lady boss at the time saying "at the end of the day, we are just a commodity, today you, tomorrow me"
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I read one report that said the address on the employment contracts is Jersey so UK employment laws aren't applicable.
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You are possibly right David but it’s due to Brexit that we find ourselves in this situation where this government haven’t yet composed the new UK employment law. That makes them particularly weak and I am concerned about what some Tory MPs sing about working rights.
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even if there was a new UK employment law it would make scant differance to the P&O sackings
"employing crew in places like Jersey, Guernsey and Singapore is apparently common across the ferry industry and by doing this there are fewer protections for employees"
"Unions are arguing that P&O Ferries' UK crew were easy to fire because their contracts were issued in Jersey as part of P&O’s “offshore employment model”
if as has been quoted some of these guys have worked for P&O for many years, their Union reps must have known about P&O's "offshore employment model", which was probably fit for purpose when the guys signed, but obviously not now.
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got no idea what the P&O terms & conditions are, contained within the contract, but I would have thought the Union signed off on these many years ago, so it begs the question what sweetners are within the contract that made the Unions agree to this contract, even though it reduced employment rights, maybe the union thought the sweetners outweighed the risk of employment rights ever coming to the fore.
Not good for those who have lost their jobs, but surely the Union have to be scrutinsed to ascertain why they signed off on this particular contract
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One of the key fundamentals of the Trade Union movement is to look after the interests of its members, so who signed off contracts that it would appear have no legal binding in UK employment law.
I hope government ministers do find that this action was totally illegal and that the workes righrs are protected under UK employment law.
Have you cancelled your P&O booking in support of all the workers who have lost their jobs ???
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None of us know the ins and outs of this - if P&O had gone belly up and declared itself bankrupt workers would have got statutory redundancy, the ships would have been sold off and a new owner would have come in, employing non union international seamen on worse contracts and conditions.
Jo public and truckers would be happy as fares may be lower - even tempting all those who currently support French (rather than British) sailors to travel with them!Once Irish ferries came into Dover there was overcapacity and something had to give.
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