Ferry company widely lambasted for ‘illegal’ sacking of staff
The manager seen on a video screen sacking eight hundred P&O seafarers so that the company can replace them with cheaper foreign workers – a move condemned as illegal by RMT union chief Mick Lynch – was previously an anti-union hatchet man for Royal Mail, according to the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU).
The news was published by the union in a tweet of solidarity on the CWU’s official Twitter account, warning P&O that just as the attempted ‘union-busting’ failed at Royal Mail, so it would fail with the seafarers, who are members of the RMT union:
Attempts to abuse and exploit workers are burgeoning, while the Tory government either abets or acquiesces. In the P&O case, Boris Johnson’s office denied that the government had known in advance about the sackings, but the Department for Transport subsequently admitted that the Tories had been aware.
The CWU is one of several unions to cut its funding of the Labour party over the Labour right’s assaults on workers, with Coventry council spending millions trying to break a strike for fair pay by the council’s refuse collection workers and Labour-run Kirklees council allegedly holding a meeting to discuss ‘breaking’ the council’s Unison branch, while the party itself has sacked staff and is trying to replace them with unpaid volunteers.
With Keir Starmer’s Labour trying to out-Tory the Tories, the CWU is absolutely right that all workers need to be in a union and to demand change.
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