P&O Ferries - major announcement today. All ships in port

[cakeorwine]

Gosh. I wonder what's going on

www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60779001

Use

We sailed with them in January. Awful. They have shut the food courts so no fry up breakfast and no fish and chips on the way home. Every other passenger said the same, that they would take eurotunnel next time.

Front page on Daily Mail

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10622893/P-O-Ferries-suspends-sailings-ahead-major-announcement.html

They must have had the agency staff lined up for days beforehand

What have the unions been demanding to get this sort of response?! Feel desperately for all those losing their livelihoods. Another company to add to my mini boycott list.

i've just seen that too @BernadetteRostankowskiWolowitz
seems odd

My friends who are French and have family in Calais will be upset about this because they use this as a cheaper option to the Eurostar. And even the friend who works for Eurotunnel sometimes gets the ferry as it's cheaper and can be easier/cheaper than Eurotunnel for cars.

This is very concerning.

We’re supposed to be travelling with them in the summer.

othe?r sources have suggested staff will have to sing new contracts (obviously if this IS the case worse conditions this has been done for agency cleaners in NHS when they stopped being employed by NHS direct - it has happened to other workers for other companies)
so if P & O changes company they can change conditions
Dishonest as hell immoral
are workers employed under British employment laws?

We came back at the weekend on the tunnel because it was the same price as P&O, used to be cheaper, I guess it's the cost of the diesel.

What have the RMT been doing about this? Surely redundancy means the jobs don’t exist any more, you can’t just rehire agency staff into the same jobs. What a disgrace.

Problems with accessing diesel?

@CaveMum

P&O Ferries is owned 100% by DP World which is a Dubai Government holdings company. This has nothing to do with Russian money.

Dubai - was that where Johnson just went looking for oil? Who’s the bastard upset now?

"Not going into liquidation". Yeah right. How can this be anything other than financial problems? And no, it's nothing to do with sending them off heroically to save Ukrainians.

They have been hit hard. Covid has done damage. It costs millions. Daily. to have the boats just sitting in port/ docks, not sailing, with no customers, for 2 covid years.

I'm old enough to remember when they were Townsend Thoreson: until the Zeebrugge disaster - after which they changed their name to P&O in the hope we'd forget. I haven't forgotten. Bastards.

When we looked at crossing over Christmas the ferry was going to cost as much as the channel tunnel. We would have booked the tunnel. No sense in taking a slow crossing when we could have done a faster one. We usually always do ferry because it's less than half the price but not recently.

KentLive says it is due to an operational incident ...
www.kentlive.news/news/kent-news/po-ferries-suspend-services-dover-6816956

RMT twitter feed

redundancies and agency staff waiting in the wings according to locals

Isn't the whole point of redundancy that your role must be redundant and they can't give you work elsewhere? Surely they'll go out of business with unfair dismissal court cases?!

Townshend Thoresen became P&O? But P&O have been around for literally centuries! Did they absorb TT, rather?

I can't believe they would do something so shitty so very publicly. Loads of people would boycott them- there are still competitors on the Dover- Calais routes, no? (I wouldn't know, I'm down the Brittany Ferries monopoly end of the S. coast. Cost a bomb, but I doubt they'd have much truck with awful employment practices like that).

Apparently they are offering the now redundant staff Agency roles

@Candleabra

What have the RMT been doing about this? Surely redundancy means the jobs don’t exist any more, you can’t just rehire agency staff into the same jobs. What a disgrace.

That's usually on a 1:1 basis If you're making 1000 redundant, then need 500, I'm pretty sure you're allowed to do it this way

Or they will just tweak the job description.

I never cease to be annoyed by employment rights, or lack thereof, in hospitality.

@candycane222

I'm old enough to remember when they were Townsend Thoreson: until the Zeebrugge disaster - after which they changed their name to P&O in the hope we'd forget. I haven't forgotten. Bastards.

Gosh I've never heard of this, how sad.

@Candleabra

What have the RMT been doing about this? Surely redundancy means the jobs don’t exist any more, you can’t just rehire agency staff into the same jobs. What a disgrace.

Exactly - the whole thing sounds completely bizarre. Straightforward case of unfair, and potentially also wrongful, dismissal. Not redundancy if the jobs still exist.