P&O sacks hundreds of staff, cancels all ferries for 'next few days'
Hundreds of crewmembers at one of Britain’s largest ferry operators have been sacked, as P&O Ferries cancelled sailings for “several days” and warned on its viability.
The company, owned by Nasdaq-traded Emirati shipping conglomerate DP World, earlier ordered all its vessels to port “in preparation for a company announcement”.
Transport union RMT said the fired workers were being replaced by cheaper foreign labour, and has told members to stay on their ships in protest at the mass firing.
“In its current state, P&O Ferries is not a viable business - we have made a £100m loss year on year, which has been covered by our parent DP World,” the company said in a statement.
“This is not sustainable. Without these changes there is no future for P&O Ferries.”
The company paid a £270m dividend to its owners in May 2020 - when many sailings were cancelled during the first Covid-19 lockdowns - after it used taxpayer money to furlough around 1,400 workers.
At the time, it also cut 1,100 jobs, and publicly called for £150m in government aid amid the coronavirus-related plunge in passenger numbers.
P&O said its vessels would not sail for the “next few days”, and told travellers to seek passage with its competitors.
Both the RMT union and MPs have reported seeing busloads of agency staff waiting at various ports, ready to replace P&O’s terminated workforce.
Pride of Hull full-time officer Gary Jackson told the BBC that the notice of termination was delivered to crew via a pre-recorded Zoom call, with nothing in writing being provided as yet.
P&O Ferries has been owned by DP World and its predecessor Dubai World since 2006, when the company bought what was left of the once-behemoth P&O Group.
The former group had spun off its cruise business in 2000, which is now owned by Carnival, and offloaded its remaining holding in freight operator P&O Nedlloyd in 2004, which was subsequently folded into Danish shipping giant Maersk.
P&O Ferries remains headquartered at Dover, but it re-flagged its vessels to the Cypriot port of Limassol in 2019, “for operational and accounting reasons” ahead of Brexit.
That move was criticised by the RMT union at the time, which described it as “pure opportunism”.