Sacked P&O Ferries workers replaced by staff on just £2.60 an hour, says union
Growing backlash over Dubai-owned f irm
AGENCY workers from Eastern Europe and the Philippines are allegedly being paid less than £2 an hour to replace sacked British staff at P&O Ferries.
Union officials and MPs claimed foreign staff earning less than a quarter of the national living wage were being hired by the Dubai-owned firm that dismissed 800 British staff by video call on Thursday.
Amid growing fury, Chancellor Rishi Sunak last night told The Mail on Sunday: ‘From everything I can see and have heard, they [P&O Ferries] have treated their staff in an awful way. It’s shocking to see what’s going on and sad, actually.’
Mr Sunak said Ministers had not been given notice of the move and suggested the firm’s behaviour could cost it governrun ment freight contracts worth millions of pounds a year.
‘It’s hard to get into the legal specifics ... but in general our relationship with the company across the board is something that the Transport Secretary and others are in the process of examining,’ he said.
Tory party chairman Oliver Dowden said he felt revulsion at P&O’s ‘sharp practices’, while Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng warned P&O Ferries bosses in a letter that their actions may have broken the law and that the Insolvency Service may launch an investigation.
The backlash has led P&O Ferries to hire PR firm New Century Media but that backfired when it emerged that the reputation-management firm, by former Ulster Unionist MP David Burnside, had previously worked for Russian businesses and oligarch cronies of Vladimir Putin. New Century Media said it no longer represented any oligarchs.
Karl Turner, the Labour MP for Hull, claimed during an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Filipino crew members on P&O’s Pride of Rotterdam ferry service to Holland were being paid just £1.80 an hour.
‘This is the firing of 800 British men and women seafarers to try to replace them immediately with exploited, cheap, agency foreign workers,’ he said. ‘I make no argument about those foreign workers who are turning up to just try and earn a living, but actually it’s exploiting them on the most grotesque scale.’
Billy Jones, branch secretary for Humber shipping for the RMT union, claimed Eastern Europeans had been hired on hourly wages between £2.60 and £2.80 to crew P&O’s
Pride of Hull ship. An RMT spokesman said other UK ferry firms hire foreign workers on similar wages. Shipping firms are able to avoid paying UK minimum wages because their vessels are registered overseas, often in tax havens.
Helen Kelly, communications director at the Nautilus International trade union, said she believed that some of the lowest-paid staff hired on about £2 an hour worked in hospitality roles, but skilled seafarers would be paid more.
P&O Ferries suspended its services on Thursday morning before sacking 800 staff. It claimed the move was down to losses of £100million built up during the pandemic, although its owners DP World recently boasted of record earnings of £2.9billion.
The company, owned by the Dubai state and whose routes include Cairnryan-Larne, is facing pressure over a £150 million gap in the P&O Ferries pension scheme.
P&O Ferries has hired a recruitment agency called International Ferry Management to hire new, cheaper staff. The Malta-based firm was only set up four weeks ago by Swiss shipping boss, Antonio Ciriale, 58, whose name appears in the Paradise Papers that details the use of offshore tax havens.
Cyprus-based shipping firm, Columbia Ship Management, posted an urgent job advertisement last Monday looking for seafarers in their Latvian division to start work in the UK on March 17 – the day P&O Ferries sacked its staff.
A spokesman for P&O Ferries declined to comment.
‘Firm exploits cheap foreign workers’ ‘They have treated staff in an awful way’