A 185-year-old shipping company has hired Indians at ‘poverty wages’ to replace British workers

A 185-year-old British company is paying its new Indian crew peanuts.

After suspending services and firing 800 British workers on March 17, ferry company P&O has been replacing them with cheap labour. On March 20, the UK’s Rail, Maritime, and Transport union said two P&O ships on the Liverpool-Dublin route had been crewed with Filipinos being paid a meager $3.47 per hour. It warned that the company’s future replacement staff “will be paid poverty wages”.

The next day, the Rail, Maritime, and Transport said P&O ferry crews at Dover had been replaced by Indian seafarers being paid even more dismal wages – $2.38 per hour. The union’s general secretary Mick Lynch called this a “shocking exploitation” of these workers, as well as “another gut-wrenching betrayal” of the sacked UK crew. P&O told BBC News the figure was inaccurate but did not comment on how much agencies pay workers on ferries.

“These ships of shame must not be allowed to sail,” Lynch said. “The government has to step in now and take control before it’s too late.”

There is fury in the UK over P&O’s substantial pandemic assistance: the company received £10 million in emergency aid, and the government and union supported the furloughing of some 2,500 employees. Now, it is relying on foreign workers at rock bottom wages.

Global shipping’s loopholes

While ethically dubious, what P&O is doing is not entirely illegal. It is just exploiting loopholes in global shipping.

For one, some of the ferries owned by the London-based company, which has been owned by Dubai royalty for more than 16 years now, are registered in Cyprus. They are not bound by the United Kingdom’s minimum wage laws, which stipulate hourly pay of at least £8.91 for workers aged over 23.

Secondly, ships in UK waters operate under treaties where UK law does not always apply. Specifically, ferry services operating between the UK and mainland Europe (including the Republic of Ireland) are considered “to be under innocent passage, and are not affected by UK minimum wage legislation”, the UK government notes.

Indian seafarers’ wages

Typically, an early-career seafarer in India earns about Rs 3,00,000 annually. Assuming an eight-hour day with one weekly holiday, that is well under $2 an hour. Abroad, too, they are shortchanged. For instance, where an Asian deck cadet on an oil product tanker is paid around $400 per month, a US deck cadet is fetches $950 for the same job.

That $400 also boils down to around $2 with normal working hours. And these figures are even lower when you consider that Asian crews tend to work longer hours.

Many Indian seafarers, grounded by the pandemic and subsequent vaccination asks, have been desperate to get back to work. At home, several of them have been tricked by fraudulent crewing agencies. P&O is a known name and even helped repatriate Indian crew members when Covid-19 first hit.

That does not absolve P&O of allegedly taking advantage of Indians’ desperation – but it is not the first company to do so, and it likely will not be the last.

This article first appeared on Quartz.