P & O

I the 19th century you did whatever your boss wanted doing otherwise you were out on your ear. There were good employers, Cadburys for one but basically a worker had no rights.
Unions came along and that changed things, so much that in the 70's they were too powerful and something had to be done. We gave now gone virtually full circle, yes we still have unions but we are not far off workers having very few rights.
 
bluethrunthru said:
And there you have it - anyone still working in the UK has just had their rights ripped up

www.bbc.co.uk

New P&O crew on less than £2 an hour, union claims

The RMT union says Indian seafarers recruited to work in Dover are on rock bottom rates.
www.bbc.co.uk www.bbc.co.uk

Opinion piece setting out the timeline

Click to expand...


Not really surprising that a (parent) company based in Dubai has that kind of disgusting attitude to their workforce and agency staff.

If these folks from India or the Phillipines want to go home and visit family the poor folks will have to work at least 250 hours just for the ticket.

What about a day off onshore in the UK or France? When you get paid £2 or less per hour, what can you do outside of the ship that you can afford? A bite to eat, public transport, trip to a tourist attraction or cinema? Even very basic things all costs multiples of what you get paid per hour.

How is it fair and how is it still legal?

If the same thing happened onshore the employers would be committing modern slavery offences.
 
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Fode N The Hole said:
Not really surprising that a (parent) company based in Dubai has that kind of disgusting attitude to their workforce and agency staff.

If these folks from the India or the Phillipines want to go home and visit family the poor folks will have to work at least 250 hours just for the ticket.

What about a day off onshore in the UK or France? When you get paid £2 or less per hour, what can you do outside of the ship that you can afford? A bite to eat, public transport, trip to a tourist attraction or cinema? Even very basic things all costs multiples of what you get paid per hour.

How is it fair and how is it still legal?

If the same thing happened onshore the employers would be committing modern slavery offences.
Click to expand...

welcome to Brexit Britain mate - Singapore on the Sea - a Free Market Utopia
 
Blue Mist said:
I wasn't being specific to P&O. I was generalising. I would hope someone would step in if a crew were not trained sufficiently to go to sea.
Click to expand...

You'd think so but not strictly true. There's "trained " and trained if that makes sense? I'd imagine some of them will have the certification required. Each ship has to carry a number of certificated seafarers to legally sail. Personal sea survival.is the minimum requirement everyone has to have. That can be achieved in a few days if you pass the course. Then there are lifeboat tickets, marinark evacuation certificates, crisis management, fire fighting and so on and so forth. Then all the equipment has to be serviced and maintained. Having certificates is of course a tick box exercise. Passing a course doesn't mean you can actually do the job when the shit hits the fan. That passengers can understand your orders, you know the layout of the ships when the power and lighting has failed, how to improvise if equipment malfunctions. I pray one of those ships doesn't have an emergency, particularly if loaded with 2,000 passengers, the death toll could be very high. Do P&0 and the utter **** of a CEO care? They only care about their next big bonus.
 
bluethrunthru said:
And there you have it - anyone still working in the UK has just had their rights ripped up

www.bbc.co.uk

New P&O crew on less than £2 an hour, union claims

The RMT union says Indian seafarers recruited to work in Dover are on rock bottom rates.
www.bbc.co.uk www.bbc.co.uk

Opinion piece setting out the timeline

Click to expand...


This has been the case for a number of years. Regarding P&O legally they had to contact the unions and say they wanted to amend the terms and conditions. They then had meetings and come to an agreement. This was put to the union members and if they agreed life carried on. If not they had the option of industrial action. If my memory serves me well they had to give three months notice. These agreements as far as I know were still in place when they totally ignored them. They broke the law. This is the delightful CEO of P&O. He admitted on a shipboard visit he knew nothing about ships. He's been hired for this dirty deed, paid well and I'm sure he will be off soon to do a hatchet job on some other poor unsuspecting workforce soon. Never mind so long as his bonus buys him another £1.5 million pound property then all's well in the world.

www.dailymail.co.uk

P&O Ferries Boss who sacked 800 staff owns £1.5million farmhouse

The millionaire boss of P&O Ferries, Peter Hebblethwaite (pictured), lives in a plush Cotswold farmhouse worth more than £1.5million, the Daily Mail can today reveal.
www.dailymail.co.uk
 
bluethrunthru said:
welcome to Brexit Britain mate - Singapore on the Sea - a Free Market Utopia
Click to expand...
I don’t condone P&O’s tactics here but aren’t some of P&O’s ships registered in Cyprus, which is part of the EU the last time I looked so I’m not sure if being part of it would have prevented it. I’ll stick my neck out and say that these reported low salaries are commonplace in an international market where employers can bypass national rules. We could all refuse to use companies that pay below UK minimum wage of course, but the other side of the coin is that it provides work, maybe well paid by their country’s standards, for people in poorer parts of the world. In a way, demanding everyone be paid UK minimum wage is the same as saying “Buy British”.
 
Blue Mist said:
I the 19th century you did whatever your boss wanted doing otherwise you were out on your ear. There were good employers, Cadburys for one but basically a worker had no rights.
Unions came along and that changed things, so much that in the 70's they were too powerful and something had to be done. We gave now gone virtually full circle, yes we still have unions but we are not far off workers having very few rights.
Click to expand...
Thatcher's legacy lives on, sadly.
 
Citizen of Legoland said:
I don’t condone P&O’s tactics here but aren’t some of P&O’s ships registered in Cyprus, which is part of the EU the last time I looked so I’m not sure if being part of it would have prevented it. I’ll stick my neck out and say that these reported low salaries are commonplace in an international market where employers can bypass national rules. We could all refuse to use companies that pay below UK minimum wage of course, but the other side of the coin is that it provides work, maybe well paid by their country’s standards, for people in poorer parts of the world. In a way, demanding everyone be paid UK minimum wage is the same as saying “Buy British”.
Click to expand...
It’s not rocket science.
If you are employed on a ship to sail back and forth from Dover to Calais or anywhere in U.K. or EU waters you should be protected by the workers rights laws in those jurisdictions.
 
denislawsbackheel said:
It’s not rocket science.
If you are employed on a ship to sail back and forth from Dover to Calais or anywhere in U.K. or EU waters you should be protected by the workers rights laws in those jurisdictions.
Click to expand...
I think it is rocket science or quite complicated at least. You would need to consider who can and can't work in the different waters, what minimum wages they are entitled to, how it affects staff on other ships that traverse international waters, where the ships are registered, whether it is right to stop a worker being employed by a 3rd party agency at a rate they can accept, I mean I work for myself in the UK and could charge myself out at 1p an hour if I wanted to and was feeling very generous, but that takes the opportunity away from someone who needs proper pay. It should be simple really, the staff should be employed out of a base from one of the ports they call at, but employers always seem to find a way round it.
 
Sorry I'm just trying to catch up on this - are these ferries on any sort of government contracts/licenses, or can anyone with a bunch of boats start ferrying people to and fro?
 
This government can but won’t take action. Simple really. Make lots of noise, agree that P & O are awful, say you are going to review government contracts and then forget about it. £300m investment and a £30m subsidy to build a ‘Freeport’ is not going to be passed over. Might as well get used to it now.
 
Fode N The Hole said:
Not really surprising that a (parent) company based in Dubai has that kind of disgusting attitude to their workforce and agency staff.

If these folks from India or the Phillipines want to go home and visit family the poor folks will have to work at least 250 hours just for the ticket.

What about a day off onshore in the UK or France? When you get paid £2 or less per hour, what can you do outside of the ship that you can afford? A bite to eat, public transport, trip to a tourist attraction or cinema? Even very basic things all costs multiples of what you get paid per hour.

How is it fair and how is it still legal?

If the same thing happened onshore the employers would be committing modern slavery offences.
Click to expand...

Put like that surely this is modern day slavery?

Even if I wasn’t already never going to book with them again because of this whole debacle not sure I’d want to put my safety in the hands of a company that thinks it ok to pay crew less than £2 an hour
 
metalblue said:
Put like that surely this is modern day slavery?

Even if I wasn’t already never going to book with them again because of this whole debacle not sure I’d want to put my safety in the hands of a company that thinks it ok to pay crew less than £2 an hour
Click to expand...

It very much is, but through the use of outsourcing companies and reflagged ships the bastards have managed to circumvent those laws.

Practically this option may be the best one for the foreign nationals, compared to insecure merchant navy jobs or servants. Especially with the foreign currency exchange bonus but that isn't good enough.

A very good point, and something that would make a compellingly case if the P&O ever found themselves in court for civil claims or corporate manslaughter and other health and safety offences.

You can't escape liability for negligence when subcontracting to substandard disreputable companies. When agencies pay staff that much how is it possible to conclude that they are anything other than that?


www.nautilusint.org

Just £1.81 per hour for agency crew replacing P&O Ferries workers

Agency crew hired to replace P&O Ferries workers are being paid just £1.81 per hour, according to information received by the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT).
www.nautilusint.org www.nautilusint.org
 
I doubt you would come all the way from Colombia spending 2 months wages on a plane ticket, work for very slightly more than you get in Colombia for a day or two then walk out.

There are obviously a lot of disingenuous claims being made as it doesn't add up.
 
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