P&O’s barbaric sackings share ‘Hall of Infamy’ with Clerys

British socialist newspaper, the Morning Star, this week called the brutal way that P&O Ferries sacked 800 workers over a Microsoft Teams meeting on St Patrick's Day a "textbook example of 21st century monopoly capitalism". But it wasn't. Few companies behave this moronically when sacking workers.

If it was a textbook example of anything, it was of incompetence and poor judgment. That is why the issue has blown up into such a major scandal in Britain. You can’t sack hundreds of workers remotely with zero notice from a well-known business familiar to consumers, and expect it to sail through.

Whenever companies make such catastrophic miscalculations, they tend to be pilloried in the media and by politicians. Management’s competency becomes the story and usually they end up rowing back a bit to make some of the criticism go away.

With a nod to the botched sacking six years ago of 460 workers at a Dublin department store, the mess at P&O Ferries this week is basically Clerys on water.

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Last Thursday the ferry operator, whose routes include Dublin to Liverpool and Larne in Antrim to Cairnryan in Scotland, summarily sacked 800 mostly UK-based seafarers. The unlucky cohort also included about 25 crew from the Republic and 35 from the North.

All of them are to be replaced by outsourced agency crew paid below the UK minimum wage. This appears to be legal because many of the ships are flagged abroad in places such as Bermuda and the Bahamas.

P&O tried to justify the move on the basis that it has lost £100 million a year in recent years, with the gap plugged by its Dubai-based parent group, DP World.

The last two years have seen the ferries sector devastated by a once-in-a-generation pandemic. Its losses of recent years cannot be used as a yardstick for anything. But even if P&O has a point that it needs to stay competitive, there was nothing inevitable about what happened last week.

One really has to wonder what on earth Andy Goode, the P&O human resources adviser, was thinking when he pre-recorded his video for that four-minute Teams meeting with 800 workers last Thursday.

He sounds as if he is reading a local news bulletin, his delivery as dry as a bone. Goode weakly apologies for reading from a script, then he delivers the punchline: “I am sorry to inform you that this means your employment is terminated with immediate effect… Your final day of employment is today.”

As Goode spoke, security guards with handcuffs prepared to board P&O’s ships in Antrim, Cairnryan and Liverpool to evict its workers at the docks. No notice of the move was given to unions, there was little further information other than “you’re done”, and seemingly no thought was given to how such a barbaric sacking would play out in the social media age. Goode’s video went viral.

Perhaps P&O thought people would be too distracted that day by green beer or the war in Ukraine. But its handling of the issue has turned the company’s reputation into nuclear waste and put it at the centre of public fury that threatens its corporate objectives. P&O should count itself lucky if it isn’t boycotted.

Humiliated

Peter Hebblethwaite, its chief executive, must not have had the front to deliver the bad news himself to staff in the Teams video. He was humiliated yesterday at a hearing in front of angry British politicians. The public and political opprobrium may ensure that P&O is forever associated with this mess.

It is right up there in the Hall of Infamy alongside the closure of Clerys in June 2016. That day, management of the department store gathered all its staff at 5.30pm at the bottom of its famous staircase and told them it was closing with immediate effect. They were all out of work. Security guards changed the locks, and staff members were literally put out onto the street on Dublin city’s main thoroughfare in the middle of rush hour. It was truly shocking.

Unbeknownst to most workers, the department store had been split into a property company, which kept all of the group’s value, and an operating company, which was left with the debts including Clerys’ workers’ redundancy pay. The whole lot was secretly sold the previous night to property developer Deirdre Foley’s Natrium consortium, which a few minutes later sold the doomed operating company that employed the staff to an insolvency practitioner for €1.

The State was initially left on the hook for more than €2 million in redundancy, while the bewildered staff were left outside to roam O’Connell Street in front of RTÉ’s cameras. It is hard to think of a more cynical and badly-handled deal in Irish corporate history.

Foley’s consortium has since sold its interest in the development project on the Clerys site. But she will forever be associated with it and the Clerys name, until then a much-loved brand, will always be linked publicly to its closure.

There are other such cases. Indian-US entrepreneur, Vishal Garg, sacked 900 workers over Zoom a fortnight before Christmas from his online mortgage business, Better. com. He told staff on the call that ending their employment made him so sad he felt like crying, but the next day he wrote a blogpost suggesting some of them were lazy.

Even in the US, where red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism is more accepted than here, his treatment of workers was deemed so unacceptable that he had to basically disappear from public view for months.

In 2016, 100 staff at internet company Yelp's Dublin headquarters were stunned when its founder, Jeremy Stoppleman, casually sacked them all on a conference call with investors. It showed up the vacuity of the Silicon Valley work culture, which feigns kindness and caring but which is as ruthless as any other corporate culture when there are cuts to be made and costs to be saved.

Mass redundancies are an unfortunate fact of business life. Most people accept this, even if they don’t like it when it happens.

But when companies such as P&O choose to suddenly sack hundreds of workers over a video call in a cynically pre-planned operation, while cheap replacement workers sit outside on the docks in minibuses waiting to take their place, then they deserve every bit of criticism and strife that they get.

It represents a breach of public trust and a moral failure. Morals aren’t always everything in business. But they are more than nothing.