P&O Ferries sparks outrage by sacking 800 workers | Hacker News Reader

P&O Ferries sparks outrage by sacking 800 workers

bbc.co.uk

Had an expat US friend who was working for a UK firm try to give notice to his company. The company refused to accept his giving notice & threatened legal action against him if he didn't give it-least 12 months notice... So 0 days notice is surprising here.

I want to know how they plan to get 800 third party contractors sufficiently trained to run a ferry service in a few days having already fired everyone with knowledge of how these ferry's run...

It only takes a handful of the disgruntled employees to sneak some sand into the ships engine lubricant system and that ship is going to be out of action for a year...

No consultation for a redundancy were the service remains the same. Can notsee hwo this is compliant with UK employment law.

I read somewhere that they were exploiting some sort of maritime-related loophole, although the article didn't get into the detail of what said loophole was.

These are seafarers working on Cypriot flagged vessels used in international voyages.

UK employment law is entirely irrelevant here, only international maritime law applies.

To put it in context, P&O Ferries has always been UK based and flagged until it's sold to a Dubai owner in 2006 and it's reflagged to Cyprus early 2019. That opened up the opportunity for this to happen.

All the routes are contracted by the UK government. I'd say the government should have reviewed the contracts back in 2019 and done something to ensure the UK based staff are protected. But as we have observed the last few years the government has been rather distracted and incompetence at the same time. And now the horse has bolted.

The problem is that even if it is in breach of the law the compensation isn't much so P&O can do this and just pay off the people they're firing. Having said that, the scale of the redundancies open them up to other issues - like they were meant to inform the business secretary, but I don't know how strong that law is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com