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

Source Daily Telegraph 19/03/22

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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.