Boris Johnson is politically powerless in the face of the P&O sackings

The rights of workers has never been a particular strong suit for the Conservatives, but there is scope for the prime minister to change that in the long term, argues Sean O’Grady

Boris Johnson on his way to Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons on Wednesday (AFP/Getty)

Short of taking P&O into public ownership and giving the 800 sacked workers their old jobs back, the reality is that there is remarkably little Boris Johnson can do about their summary redundancy.

Politically, it means that the prime minister will continue to look powerless and possibly even complacent in the face of what he himself describes as “scandalous” behaviour by the company. Without some tangible success he risks looking weak and reluctant to take decisive action to protect workers’ rights, never a particularly strong suit for his party.

Yet, at Prime Minister’s Questions he was at it again. Johnson made a meal of quoting section 194 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations Act of 1992 and the 1996 Employment Rights Act: “It looks to me as though the company concerned has broken the law, and we will be taking action, therefore, and we will be encouraging workers themselves to take action.” According to the prime minister, the fines might amount to “millions of pounds”. There will also be an extension of rights and the living wage to the British “exclusive economic zone” is promised (which implies the current law does indeed not protect the ex-P&O staff).

As ever in employment law, the picture is less clear than the prime minister suggests, and not least because of an obscure change in the law made by Chris Grayling, then transport secretary, in 2018. The law was amended so that the secretary of state for business does not have to be notified of mass redundancies on ships registered overseas. P&O’s ferries were registered in Cyprus and the Bahamas, and therefore, arguably, the sackings were lawful. On Tuesday, P&O Ferries wrote to the current business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, saying it had not acted illegally as it had notified the relevant authorities for its ships flagged in Cyprus, Bermuda and the Bahamas. The case may end up being decided by a court, and with some difficulty.

There are other steps the prime minister could take, such as freezing P&O out of government contracts or the new free port schemes, but Johnson is non-committal about such moves. The issue is further complicated because P&O is ultimately owned by the Dubai-based DP World.

More broadly, there is an opportunity for a little political trickery here, if the Conservatives decided to clarify and strengthen employment rights, and present the reform as a Brexit bonus (because so much of the law is inherited from European Court rulings), and as part of the amorphous “levelling up” agenda. It was something Theresa May toyed with during her premiership, and she even floated the idea of workers on the boards of directors of major companies.

The Taylor Report a few years ago made a number of recommendations to modernise the law in the age of flexible working and the “gig economy”, but they were never actioned. Business interests within the Conservative Party have generally been hostile to such moves, but that has merely allowed the courts to make relevant law in the absence of parliamentary activity – as in the landmark Uber drivers case.

Conservative governments have usually been associated with weakening the power of the trade unions (the last such piece of legislation was passed in 2015) and the 2019 manifesto promised: “We will require that a minimum service operates during transport strikes. Rail workers deserve a fair deal, but it is not fair to let the trade unions undermine the livelihoods of others.”

The government might like to balance such a move with some more legal protections for casual and zero hours contracts. In a world where UK tax and employment law don’t even have their own clear and consistent definition of what constitutes an “employee”, “staff”, “worker”, “freelance”, “self-employed” and so on, it’s little wonder employers try to take advantage of the confusion.