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Sacking your staff by video is a return to an age when workers were treated with casual disdain | Frank Cottrell-Boyce
The P&O sackings is where you end up when business and government undermine basic protections and lose touch with common decency
My grandfather went to sea in his mid-teens. He served at the battle of Jutland – the Somme of the sea. In the Second World War, he worked on the Atlantic convoys, bringing food and supplies to a besieged Britain – the Stalingrad of the sea. Shortly after the war, the ship on which he was working as a stoker, the Cydonia, hit a stray mine and he was boiled alive when the engine blew up. The newspapers reported that the ship had been damaged “with the loss of one greaser”. The same phrasing appears in the records of the shipping company. He’s not named anywhere. He was commemorated not as a person but as a component.
Which is how P&O dealt with their employees last week. All ships called in as if they were pedalos on a boating lake; security sent in to remove crews. So here we are, an island nation, our sea lanes closed just when every parish hall and spare room is filling up with toiletries and warm clothing that people were hoping to ship to Ukraine. The companies in Jason Reitman’s film Up in the Air outsource uncomfortable sackings to a “corporate downsizer”, played by George Clooney. That seemed far fetched at the time but P&O didn’t even bother with that. They sacked crews remotely, using a pre-recorded Teams message.
Frank Cottrell-Boyce is a British screenwriter and novelist
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