‘Do you think you could live on £4.87 an hour?” Liam Byrne, the chair of the Commons business and trade committee, asked Peter Hebblethwaite, the chief executive of P&O Ferries, last Tuesday. “No, I couldn’t,” Hebblethwaite replied. “Why do you think that your staff should have to live on that?” Byrne continued. Because, Hebblethwaite responded, “these are international seafarers”.
The select committee was taking evidence from business leaders, academics and officials on the protection of workers’ rights. Two years ago, Hebblethwaite faced another select committee after P&O had caused national outrage by abruptly sacking almost 800 workers, replacing them with low-paid agency staff from countries such as India, Malaysia and the Philippines. Just how low was exposed by a Guardian/ITV investigation in March that found some being paid at less than half the minimum wage in Britain. Many routinely work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, for up to 17 weeks at a time. But no matter, they are only “international seafarers”.
In 2022, , after the mass sackings, the then transport secretary, Grant Shapps, told Hebblethwaite that his position as CEO was “untenable”. He threatened to review P&O’s government contracts and promised to bring “a comprehensive package of measures” to protect seafarers. “This government will not stand by while the requirement to treat seafarers with due respect and fairness is brazenly ignored,” he warned.
It should come as little surprise that “standing by” is exactly what the government has done. Hebblethwaite remains CEO, his company has not lost government contracts, and there remains little “respect and fairness” in P&O’s treatment of its workers.
In March, France introduced a law forcing companies running cross-Channel ferries to pay staff at least the French minimum wage of €11.65 (£9.95) an hour. Britain has promised a similar law but it is yet to be enacted.
The case of P&O exposes the problems both of globalisation and of much opposition to it. “Globalisation” is a concept with myriad meanings – and with economic, political and cultural dimensions. Mostly, as with P&O, it refers to a particular mode of capitalism that relies on an international division of labour and the diminution of controls on capital movement across borders to depreciate costs and push up profits.
It is a form of globalisation driven by “neoliberalism”, the vision of free-market economics rooted in the work of figures such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, which became dominant in the decades after the collapse, in the 1980s, of the Soviet Union in the east and of the Keynesian postwar order in the west.
At its heart was not simply the unleashing of the market but also, in the words of historian Quinn Slobodian, the “designing [of] institutions… to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy”, institutions from the IMF and the World Bank, and governance structures from the European Union to the trade regulations overseen by the World Trade Organization (WTO). “A democratic society,” Milton Friedman, the US economist and intellectual guru to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, told an interviewer for Forbes magazine in 1988, “destroys a free economy”, because it inevitably leads to demands for the redistribution of wealth.
The social consequences of such globalisation, from soaring inequality to the erosion of democratic norms, has led in the past decade to a political backlash, exemplified by the rise of populism, both from the left and far more successfully from the right. Disenchantment with globalisation has generated also new enthusiasm for nationalism and the nation state.
For many, the trouble with P&O is that ownership passed into “foreign hands”, the British company having been bought in 2006 by DP World, part of Dubai’s sovereign wealth fund. “Ownership must come home” demand critics, because “rootless, global capitalism has no regard for locality or place”, treating workers “not as human beings, but as expendable units”.
The idea that British companies would treat workers better because they have “regard for locality or place” is about as plausible as imagining that Shapps was ever serious about his threats to Hebblethwaite. The witness questioned by the select committee immediately after Hebblethwaite was Sean Toal, managing director of that very British company WH Smith. He had been summoned to explain why he had paid staff at below the minimum wage. It’s not just perfidious foreigners who seek to exploit British workers.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the start of the miners’ strike. In the decades since that totemic confrontation, successive governments have demolished union rights, diminished rights to protest and privatised large swathes of Britain’s social fabric and public spaces. Companies, British and foreign owned, have taken full advantage of the new opportunities to enable harsher working conditions. The current row over the Labour party’s watering down of its commitments to workers’ rights suggests that even after an election little may change.
In his book Crack-Up Capitalism, Slobodian shows how insulating the market from democratic forces takes place within nation states as well as beyond them. “Inside the containers of nations,” he writes, “are unusual legal spaces, anomalous territories and peculiar jurisdictions.” These enclaves range from freeports to city-states, all geographically part of the nation but with distinct laws and regulations, whether different tax regimes or, at the extreme, the denial of workers’ rights.
The irony of the ire directed at Dubai for its ownership of P&O is that Dubai has become a model for many politicians in post-Brexit Britain. In 2016, a little-known MP by the name of Rishi Sunak wrote a report for the rightwing thinktank the Centre for Policy Studies, extolling the virtues of freeports as “signalling Britain’s openness to the world” and singling out Dubai’s Jebel Ali free zone as the model.
Dubai’s success in generating fabulous wealth is built on the backs of what is effectively a workforce of indentured labourers, mainly from south Asia, and the brutal intolerance of trade unions and of workers’ rights. It is a globalised vision of a P&O ferry. And it is what many in Britain want to imitate. Politicians who have built a career around the defence of national sovereignty are happy to give away such sovereignty so long as it serves corporate interests.
The issue at P&O is not one of nationality but of class. The solution can only lie in collective action to defend both British workers and “international seafarers”. If the P&O debacle teaches us anything, it is that the rights of the one are inextricably linked to the rights of the other.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
