Could P&O’s odious chief sink any lower?
P&O BOSS Peter Hebblethwaite – the bloke who has a £1.5million Cotswold home with a swimming pool, and trousers £325,000 a year plus bonuses – was asked this week by a Labour MP: “Are you in this mess because you don’t know what you are doing? Or are you just a shameless criminal?”
Hebblethwaite, who was being grilled by MPs, kind of answered the question when he admitted the company had wilfully broken the law and that he took the decision to sack 800 staff without notice or consultation because he knew the unions would never accept normal redundancy.
“I completely throw my hands up,” he said. “There is no doubt we were required to consult with the unions and we chose not to do that.”
Hang on – so, if you don’t like the rules that govern you and which exist to protect workers, you just ignore them and do what the hell you like? And, yes, that seems to be the case because an unrepentant Hebblethwaite says he’d do the same thing again: “I know that if we hadn’t made radical changes the business would have closed. I would make the same decision again.”
All of which makes a nonsense of the apology he gave to staff he sacked and their families – the same staff burly P&O guards marched off the ships. He admitted new agency crews who have been taken on will be paid as little as £5.15 an hour – well below the UK minimum wage which is £9.50 from April 1. So the once great P&O is now an advocate of slave labour?
Who with any conscience would ever want to travel or do business with this company ever again?
If they can exploit staff in this callous way, what’s to stop them exploiting customers too? So we shouldn’t use them – for anything!
P&O seems to think the fact it’s forking out £36million to sacked staff – the largest payout in maritime history – in some way mitigates what it has done to 800 families. It doesn’t.
First, those workers only get the money if they sign gagging orders. Second, whatever they’re paying, it won’t last long.And what happens after that? P&O is a big employer in the Dover area – where are the people whose lives are there going to get jobs?
I wonder if when fat cat Hebblethwaite – who looks like he’s had a few too many good dinners – takes a dip in his pool, he thinks about what happens to a family hit by redundancy? As he reaches out for his post-swim G&T does he actually care about the fact that the bottom literally dropped out of their world?
Does it bother him these people whose confidence has been shattered live in fear of never getting another job? Does he understand their terror about losing their homes, of not being able to pay their bills? I don’t suppose, on what he earns, he does.
WHEN he was asked by MPs if he’d refuse any performance-related bonuses from his employers, he batted it off with: “I can’t tell you how far away that is from my thoughts.”
If he had even a smattering of conscience his answer would have been: “No, I won’t accept it.” The fact he prevaricated shows that heWILL.
Huw Merriman,Tory chairman of the Transport Committee, says: “We have to make it absolutely clear to P&O they have broken the law and there are ramifications for that, including personal liability for the chief executive. He needs to hand his card in.”
I’m pretty sure Hebblethwaite won’t do that. The man who has brazenly admitted to breaking the law and been responsible for the most vile kind of corporate thuggery will just go back to his mansion, pour himself a large drink and think “job done”.
He’s done the bidding of his Dubai bosses. Hell, he’ll probably even get a raise.