DEMANDS are multiplying for the dismissal of P&O boss Peter Hebblethwaite after his admission to MPs that he deliberately broke the law in sacking 800 seafarers overnight to replace them with lower-cost labour.
Firing Hebblethwaite may be the least he could expect. Generally admissions of deliberate law-breaking are followed by arrest and criminal charges.
Don’t hold your breath. This is capitalist law we are talking about. The bipartisan outrage at the P&O chief’s bland admission that questions of legality did not detain him in his search for increased profitability illustrates how unusual this circumstance is.
It highlights the fact that employers very seldom need to deliberately break the law in order to get their way.
The laws are designed to allow their right to conduct their businesses as they please in pursuit of maximising shareholder returns, including their sovereignty over labour.
Such laws as do place any limitations on the Hebblethwaites of the business world are themselves undermined by very weak enforcement. For example, there have been less than 20 prosecutions for underpaying the minimum wage since 2007.
Yet you could find more than that number of garment factories underpaying their workers in a couple of streets in Leicester alone.
Tory cuts have made weak enforcement more feeble still. The law is an optional extra, not an inescapable obligation, for the rapacious capitalist.
It has been widely remarked that such indulgence is not available to organised labour. Had the sacked seafarers occupied their P&O vessels, as they would have had every right to do, they would doubtless have been removed by force, with the company deploying private security goons who would, however, have had the law on their side.
And had a trade union wilfully broken the law in the brazen Hebblethwaite fashion, it would have been exposed to unlimited fines and the sequestration of its assets. Under such circumstances the law becomes a vital weapon in the capitalist armoury. The rule of law is upgraded from optional to mandatory.
These are the conventional hypocrisies of bourgeois political economy. But perhaps there is a more positive lesson to be learned from the candour coming from the top of P&O, which was remember the owner of the appropriately named Herald of Free Enterprise when it capsized with 193 deaths in 1987.
It is that Hebblethwaite saw absolutely no reason why considerations of legality should impede him in running his company as he felt necessary. Doubtless that is easier if you have no realistic anticipation of getting your collar felt as a consequence, but the point should be a double-edged one.
The worship of capitalist legality has done much to disarm the working-class movement over the last 40 years. It has served to keep struggle against job losses, wage cuts and other depredations within bounds wherein they are likely to end in defeat. That is, indeed, the point of the laws in the first place.
Of course, breaking the law cannot be treated as lightly by trade unions as by employers. The risks are much higher, designedly.
Nevertheless, when there is a significant degree of public sympathy for the cause and a realistic chance of success there is no sense in labour imposing on itself legalistic inhibitions which capital does not.
This is recognised in principle. Unite, for example, removed the rulebook requirement to only take such action as is within the law some years ago.
As we face an epic fall in living standards after years of austerity and wage stagnation, the labour movement needs all the tools in its armoury to defend working people. Call it the Hebblethwaite Principle.
