The sacking of P&O Ferries workers (P&O Ferries told it could face unlimited fine if sackings unlawful, 18 March) echoes the treatment meted out to 700 workers at Gate Gourmet who were sacked by megaphone in 2005.
These workers, mainly female and of south Asian origin, prepared food for British Airways flights. They were dismissed while attending a meeting called by their union to protest against the imposition of agency workers on their production line.
A third of the workforce were subsequently rehired on contracts offering inferior pay and working conditions in a compromise agreement negotiated by their union, the TGWU. Among the remainder, many took voluntary redundancy, while others, including older women, were selected for compulsory redundancy.
Some 60 women who refused to accept what they saw as unfair dismissal took their cases to an employment tribunal, and lost. The Gate Gourmet workers’ struggle against hire-and-fire policies has been largely forgotten, but highlighted well-founded fears about cuts in workers’ protection.
We need safeguards against employers’ strategies to downgrade workers’ pay and conditions. We also need to resist pitting agency workers against those with secure contracts, British workers against migrant ones, and recognise this as an attack on all workers’ rights.
The government’s response to this unfair and potentially illegal flouting of accepted process for large-scale redundancies will be watched carefully, given the steep fall in real wages and living standards across the economy.
Prof Sundari Anitha
University of Lincoln
Emeritus Professor Ruth Pearson University of Leeds
• P&O Ferries’ action is not exceptional. This old maritime historian remembers similar cavalier disregard for workers 34 years ago. In May 1988, P&O European Ferries sacked 400 personnel at Dover. Untrained crew and strike breakers were recruited in their place, which created a safety risk to passengers.
Today P&O is wheeling in agency staff. Same risk. Today P&O says the 20% cut is part of necessary rationalisation. Same excuse. But last time, new Channel Tunnel competition was cited as justification. P&O was out to break union power. The outcome in 1988 was that the courts sequestered the seafarers’ union assets and funds. P&O finished off the National Union of Seamen, which had protected lives in this dangerous trade for over a century. P&O’s past action left seafarers, already one of the most vulnerable occupational groups, even more vulnerable.
Dr Jo Stanley
Marsden, West Yorkshire
• Your explainer (18 March) concludes that the P&O sackings aren’t really due to Brexit. However, it could be argued that, had we not already been out of the EU, this is exactly the sort of thing that would have been blamed on our membership, instead of the normal operation of naked capitalism.
Phil Coughlin
Houghton-le-Spring, Tyne and Wear
• No doubt P&O Ferries factored the potential costs of unfair dismissal into its decision to fire staff without notice. Since the only thing it seems to understand is the profit motive, the best way to approach it is with a full-scale consumer boycott. I for one will be using its competitors until it reinstates the staff who have been sacked.
Dave Pollard
Leicester
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