When Grant Shapps hoped P&O Ferries would fold before the ultimatum of his this week & reinstate 800 sacked employees, a letter by return quickly disabused him.
Such a move, P&O Ferries’ chief executive Peter Hebblethwaite stated, would result in the business collapsing, incorporating the transportation secretary was “ignoring the situation’s factual and fundamental realities”.
It wouldn’t be the very first time a minister had done so, when it involves the ocean. While Shapps has today promised steps to handle the activities of P&O Ferries, which dismissed each crew within the UK used on the “British” of its, (but Jersey issued) contracts, moreover enforce minimum wages, the federal government has extended turned a blind eye paying abuses.
In 2014, the late Bob Crow, then RMT union leader, decried the “super exploitation of international nationals in the British delivery industry… an enormous scandal that the political elite want to maintain quiet”. The union released protests over Condor Ferries, which sails from Poole and Portsmouth on the Channel Islands crewed from companies abroad, that it states pay as little £2.40 an hour. (Condor didn’t react to requests for comment.)

Ferries Plan
For original 2021, when Irish Ferries announced plans to take its inexpensive crewing design on the Dover Calais corridor, unions warned of a race on the bottom. Irish Ferries were definitely the forefathers of P&O axe wielding, in 2005 sacking – albeit with consultation – plenty of crew to replace them with international bureau employees. Rather than acting, the RMT complained, the federal government “rolled out the white carpet”. (Irish Ferries didn’t react to requests for comment.)
Hebblethwaite was directed by Darren Jones, the seat of the Commons business committee, in case he was a “shameless criminal”, though he’s candidly answered a lot of the questions that ministers don’t actually wanted to question. The typical pay of any seafarer on the Jersey contract was £36,000 a year, he told very last week’s hearings; ripping that in place for cheap agency crew, average hourly pay will be aproximatelly £5.50 an hour.