Unions are as much to blame as P&O bosses for the ferry chaos

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It is not just the RMT. The University and College Lecturers union has been leading its members out on strike even though everyone knows students have been through two years of terrible disruption and many universities may no longer be financially viable post-pandemic.

Teaching unions threatened strike action at schools last year. The Public and Commercial Services Union has been leading workers at the DVLA on strike even with a critical backlog of driving tests to deal with.

Unite has been organizing industrial action by bin workers at councils such as Coventry, and threatening action by baggage handlers at Luton Airport, while Unison workers in Glasgow have voted to strike over equal pay. And that is just in the last month or so. The list goes on and on.

In reality, after two decades of waning union power following the Thatcher reforms of the 1980s, the trade unions are starting to return to 1970s levels of militancy. Overwhelming in the cosseted public sector, or a handful of protected monopolies, they instinctively resist change, provoke disputes, and stir up unrest, often motivated more by a hard-left political agenda than any real concern for the workforce.

Industrial relations shouldn’t be this hard. Managers should be able to sit down with staff, explain that there will have to be redundancies, make them voluntary where possible, and well-compensated when not, and agree on a plan that can keep the business profitable.

The RMT won’t countenance that, and neither, increasingly, will many other unions. Companies are left with no options than bankruptcy or confrontation.

P&O may not have handled the matter well. But if it breaks the power of the RMT, the result will be the secure, profitable ferry network an island nation needs – and quite a few commuters will be quietly cheering them on.

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