‘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”.
That’s the scene setting.
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.
You what? £1 an hour in either India or the Philippines is a damn good wage. So, here we’ve got labour from those places being paid near 5 times that to work in (OK, if you insist, right on the edges of) our economy.
This is the international division of labour? But, but, that would be insisting that those poor folk have to stay home and make £1 an hour. And the mobility of labour is in fact proof of the mobility of capital?
Seriously, does even Malik believe any of this shit?
The social consequences of such globalisation, from soaring inequality to the
How does people moving from £1 an hour labouring to £5 an hour labouring increase inequality?
It’s all complete bollocks, isn’t it? The sort of shite that would only survive in an echo chamber, the result of groupthink.
It might be more appropriate for the Commons business and trade committee to focus on the plight of British workers who have lost their jobs, rather than Indians earning 15 times as much as their peers.
And any commentator who doesn’t like globalisation might consider the effect on wages of the 10m immigrants Britain has imported over the past 3 decades. Or perhaps muse on the curious similarity between the number of foreign-born people in this country with the number of ‘economically-inactive’ people….
Yes Tim, but the problem is that these people are earning their £4.87 in Britain. It will take an entire days wages to have a few pints after work. But seriously what do they do ? Live on the boats ? I earned that sort of money doing odd agency jobs in the 1980s and lived with my mum.
Also P&O sacked British workers and replaced them with Third Worlders. In the current climate a rathe inpolitic move , made worse because they are thus circumventing decades of UK merchant navy safety regulation .
To be honest pretty indefensible from P&O.
Marius
I again repeat my proposal that all immigrants be enslaved. Then you’d have 10 million toilers working for nothing more than a few whacks with the whip.
Boganboy, you could go on the Spectator YouTube “The Week in 60 minutes” spot. Fraser Nelson, the editor of the Spectator is, for some unknowable reason, a fanboy of Rishi and you’d enable Rishi to claim that he’d found the thousands of “far-right activists” that he’s always worried about. As opposed to those entirely peaceful “Pro Palestinian marchers demanding that murderers and rapists be allowed to have a rest to get their breath back before doing their highly productive murdering and raping.
When I was at sea back in the 1970’s we had Indian crew. Other companies had Chinese crew. Away from home for 6 months, earning good money for them and a pittance as far as UK wages were concerned. They were happy doing it. They weren’t forced to do it. It’s the same now. (And I very much doubt if any of them had a beer after work, even when we were coasting around the UK).
Thanks Grist. But I think they’d all find me a bit too left wing!!
What’s so special about UK seafarers thrown on the scrapheap by globalisation? Didn’t that happen to IT workers, call centre workers, steel workers, shipbuilders and many more? Globalisation happened. You can’t avoid the effects. Nor do you need to GAF about the poorly paid foreigners.
Differences in time and space.
When I was a student in the 1980s I paid £25 a week for my digs. I’d be lucky to pay 8 or 10 times that much these days.
These guys do their 12 hour stint on Pride of Kent where do they live for the other 12 ? What do they eat ? How do they cook it ? Do they get fed on the boat ? The State has clamped down on the old landlord practices of 20 to a room living in shifts.
Boganboy’s point about slavery is only supeficially attractive. The Master has to feed and house the slaves and they are expensive to buy. They are a big capital cost to production and they have no incentive to perform efficiently.
“How does people moving from £1 an hour labouring to £5 an hour labouring increase inequality?”
Well thats simple. If Sanjay earns £5/hr working on a UK ferry and sends that money home to his family in India, they get to live a far better life than their neighbours who only earn £1/hr. Ergo inequality is increased. Far better he earns £1 like the rest of them.
I agree with Kenan Malik, deport the foreigners and replace them with Brits on higher wages.
Reminds me of all those leftie film makers who show you harrowing pictures of people working in factories then on the voice over announce that they’re earning wages that couldn’t cover the cost of their food or rent if they lived in the UK (good job they don’t, then) and deplore the huge inequality this signifies. Without considering what those people would be earning without said factory, usually much less, and the reduction in inequality it has brought about. Even workers in other sectors of the economy start getting paid more because their employers are now in competition for workers with the factories.
That being said, the problem with P&O is that they’re more “over here” than “over there”. In PR terms this behaviour gets an F grade. Might be tricky for government to do something about it, but they might try – even if there’s no legislative action, odds on for there to be some strings attached to any bail-out if the business model goes tits up.
Ottokring,
“Yes Tim, but the problem is that these people are earning their £4.87 in Britain. It will take an entire days wages to have a few pints after work. But seriously what do they do ? Live on the boats ? I earned that sort of money doing odd agency jobs in the 1980s and lived with my mum.”
My guess is that they get fed on the boats and mostly live on them. You pile in the days, the hours, you spend nothing and walk away with (in Indian terms) a shitload of money. If it’s true that it’s 12 hour days 7 days a week (sounds unlikely but let’s do it) for 17 weeks, that’s £7140. For someone coming from a country paying £1/hour, that’s the far more than than the average annual wage. You take your money, you go home and you don’t work the rest of the year. Or maybe you do 17 weeks, have a break for a month, then do it again, and after a year, you’ve made say £15K and you’re living a very good life in India.
Unless you think someone is a retard, or that there’s a guy with a whip saying “your name is Toby”, someone is choosing to do a job for a good reason. You might not understand what it is, but they are.
If they live mostly on the boats, that’s a quite different equation. For example, no rent to pay which has a significant value? Ditto food? Ditto other costs (household bills)? Actually changes that £4.87/hour quite significantly.
Or, to put it differently, clearing £15K (admittedly after slogging your guts out for 11 months out of 12) is better than a hell of a lot of lower level working people manage in the UK, once they’ve paid all their bills?
Anon,
“That being said, the problem with P&O is that they’re more “over here” than “over there”. In PR terms this behaviour gets an F grade. Might be tricky for government to do something about it, but they might try – even if there’s no legislative action, odds on for there to be some strings attached to any bail-out if the business model goes tits up.”
Well, that’s what Liam Byrne is trying here, but P&O ferries aren’t an elite, virtue-signalling thing like Tesla cars where Elon’s politics means Liberals have stopped buying them. It’s the Calais or Rotterdam ferry. People just aren’t leaving P&O because they hired a load of Bharats to staff them.
And do you think the sort of people who had once lost jobs making PCs, clothing or whatever and had to find another job give a flying fuck? Were the seamen sticking up for them? But no, these people, we have to look after, and these we don’t. It’s bullshit and I suspect that most of Liam Byrne’s concern is because seafarers were in unions.
If you hate globalisation, shurley you would have to also advocate… expelling 10m people from the UK….
Otto: I was discussing exactly this with friends recently. I was paying £20 a week for one-room study bedroom on-campus accommodation in the 1980s. My university’s website lists close to identical accommodation today at £195 per week! That’s more than I pay for my *entire* flat.
Erm – let’s consider.
If the numbers quoted are true (I doubt they are, but let’s assume) then a deckhand on this deal is earning at the rate of £22,250 pa, all-found – his accommodation and food are all provided, and the staffing agencies and seamen’s organizations make sure the accommodations are decent and the food is good. As with Nelson’s navy, it’s an idiotic and false economy to feed sailors anything but the best that you can. The staffing agencies fly them to and from their contracts. Everything for their work is provided, clothing, PPE, tools, everything. And these folks are paying taxes in their domiciles – not in the UK.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that would be a pretty good pay packet for a semi-skilled labourer in the UK – no? I’m going to guess that, for a semi-skilled labourer from Malaysia or the Philippines, it is riches indeed, since he need spend virtually none of it himself but can send it all home. This is maybe why there’s never a shortage of people eager to fill these positions.
As usual, the Guardian can’t do math, or economics, and insists on seeing everything according to the standards and prejudices of a white, well-fed human-resources consultant from Islington.
llater,
llamas
Unless you think someone is a retard, or that there’s a guy with a whip saying “your name is Toby”, someone is choosing to do a job for a good reason.
For some reason I got the image of an Indian call center….
Are these blokes the sort of fellas called Lascars in 19th century tales?
Anyway, basis for comparison: the RN has (or had?) a custom of having crew from Hong king to do the laundry, cook, etc. What are/were they paid?
(In much the way that absurdly lazy undergraduates have a servant called Mum to do this sort of work. In my day some particularly idle sods would post their laundry home. One of my chums would go round to visit an aunt on Sundays so his laundry would run while he chatted with Auntie. Much more civilised, I thought.)
Laundry – not cook.
Now Gurkhas….
Yes they sleep on the boats. They are allowed to venture ashore – there are long-standing seafarers arrangements – so they can buy clothes, food, etc.
Extraordinary: the RN had Hong Kongers aboard and didn’t use them to cook. Missed opportunity there.
P.S. I met a pleasant young chap from HK recently. He absolutely insisted he was an HKer not Chinese.
I’m sure Chinese/HK peopke were cooking when I was ’embrked troops’ on Intrepid, 1974ish. The food was the best part. Embarked troops do not get good accommodation or treatment and the RN largely doesn’t speak the same language.
The food on merchant ships (certainly ‘British’ ones or those belonging to major international lines) is pretty good*; the accommodation for deck hands may not be luxurious, but it’s clean, warm and dry, which may well be better than what they get at home.
* You can book on as a passenger (though it may not be available on Expedia), and feedback is generally very favourable. My dad once had a Texan oilman on his ship, who refused to fly, but was going to visit his facilities in Lagos. He left him a box of Bolivar Royal Coronas as a parting gift (current value ~£800).
@Marius – “muse on the curious similarity between the number of foreign-born people in this country with the number of ‘economically-inactive’ people”
You mean that more immigrants means that more native British people can live a life of idle luxury? In that case who could possible be against greatly increasing immigration?
An argument for the 1930s system then.
Immigrants had no right to claim public funds, but were permitted to work.
If a Jew had crossed from Germany to France to Britain we didn’t have to wonder why they didn’t stop in France.
Obvs I’d establish their identity and previous criminality if any, and throw them out accordingly, but if you can get here with nowt and are entitled to nowt, and are identifiable and not previously criminal, then you get that visa.
Oh Charles you’re such a tease.
Idleness is corrosive to happiness. The young inexperienced are increasingly unhappy, as multiple surveys show.
@ Charles, May 12, 2024 at 7:28 pm
Recent figures showed 75% of immihgrants are economically inactive
Socialism is a Trap
Guwaa who sponsored the epitome of wokeness Baftas
Recent figures showed 75% of immigrants are economically inactive
I’m surprised it is that low given that the current flood of “refugees” are not permitted (or willing) to work. The 1930s solution as described by Bongo has to be the way to go, then there is a chance that the government would make some money from the taxes they would pay rather than wasting everyone else’s money. Pity we have no politicians with brains.
asiaseen
You’re reminding me of this Specce article, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-hunt-should-really-do-to-stop-people-claiming-benefits/.
Of course the real benefit would be that large numbers of immigrants would doubtless then flee back to France, or over the Irish border.