As P&O is rightly slammed for its reprehensible Zoom sacking, ‘The Steeple Times’ interviews a sacked employee and joins those shouting “shame on you” at pain-in-the arse Natalie Elphicke MP
After disgracefully sacking 800 workers by Zoom this week and giving them just two hours notice to leave the vessels on which they had diligently toiled, the DP World owned shipping and logistics company P&O were quite rightly slammed as “modern day slavers” and “reprehensible disgraces.”
A now former employee of this now deservedly hated firm – which has decided to replace their hardworking and loyal staff with far cheaper agency workers and which also took claimed £10 million in furlough cash during the coronavirus lockdowns – told The Steeple Times on Thursday of her shock at the way in which she and her colleagues had been treated.
Now redundant Kent based Karen Bridle remarked:
“We were short-crewed for the last week, but expected to work normal service. We could not cope and something seemed odd.”
“They could have told us yesterday so we could have collected our belongings, but the bosses cowardly waited until the old watch got off and a new watch got on. They ran the crew into the ground and I ask: ‘Why didn’t they tell us?’ Nobody knew, there were no rumours even.”
“We were told to login to Google Teams at 10.43am and I thought: ‘How can you treat people like this?’ The waffle of the head of internal relations and employee relations at the ferry operating company was shocking; what an awful man.”
“I’m shell-shocked and blindsided, but it’s P&O over and over again – disloyal to their crew.”
With commentators asking if the sackings are legal even given the lack of the standard consultation period of 45 days for redundancies of more than 100 employees and questioning whether the firm followed the “basic fundamentals of employee relations,” this matter is far from over and legal challenges will now likely quite rightly follow.
Elsewhere yesterday, the replacement MP for Dover for her convicted sex offender ex-MP husband Natalie Elphicke turned up at a protest in support of the mistreated now ex-employees. The Conservative harridan – known for her nastiness and negativity towards immigrants and bombastically blithering love of Brexit – expected to get involved and be welcomed. Instead, the crowd unsurprisingly turned on her and after she ended up having a pop at them, she did a cowardly about turn and departed looking like a total plonker.
Today, The Steeple Times makes an alternative suggestion about redundancies at the firm and that is that the only two employees of P&O that actually need to go are the Zoom disaster area that spoke on Wednesday and the CEO Peter Hebblethwaite. Instead, now, it is time for this Dubai owned operation to reinstate all of its wronged workers if they wish to avoid further humiliation.
Pictured top – A now not-going-anywhere for the moment P&O vessel and wife of disgraced ex-MP, ‘Naughty Tory’ and convicted sex offender Natalie Elphicke MP being heckled at a protest in support of P&O workers. “Shame on you” was meant to be chanted about P&O, but with this nasty piece of work’s arrival, they turned those very words on this reprehensible piece of toerag.
the RMT under Lynch has become a very aggressive and militant union.
Perhaps there is something else going on at P & O. I believe all workers will get full redundancy payments
It is an absolute disgrace, I hope there is further action over this, I just can’t believe how this was handled. I hope people just boycott this company, and run them into receivership.