MY initiation in the art of workplace negotiating came in the late 1980s and was provided by a gifted journalist and trade union activist called Dave King. Not long after I’d landed my first job at the old Scottish Catholic Observer I become the paper’s Union rep, or FoC (Father of the Chapel) as it was known in the esoteric parlance of trade union tradition.

Industrial relations on this old newspaper had proceeded according to the unwritten tenets of the ancient Catholic catch-all “you’ll get your reward in heaven”. This is a currency that the Church has deployed for centuries to bribe the more wayward of its members whenever a job of work needs doing for the parish.

Dave King was having none of it, though. And there were dark rumours he’d even flirted with atheistic communism. What on earth was the NUJ doing sending someone like him to negotiate a decent agreement with the paper’s owners, a rum assortment comprising English pre-Reformation aristocrats and the Catholic scions of the Hapsburg dynasty?

I needn’t have worried. In less than a week Mr King had become proficient to degree standard in the philosophy of modern Catholic social teaching. In particular, he seemed to have memorised entire segments about a worker’s sacred right to withdraw labour and the obligations of employers to pay a just and reasonable wage.

READ MORE KEVIN: So what Russian thing will be ban next?

By expertly linking these to traditional Catholic teachings around justice and the family he was soon dismantling the reluctance of senior management to concede much ground. Their position was reinforced by a divine form of Keynesian economics called “The Lord Will Provide”.

Thanks to Dave King we got a bigger than expected pay increase and the same holiday and sick pay entitlement enjoyed by all the larger Scottish newspapers. It helped too that our employers, at heart, were reasonable people who saw the sense of having a happy workforce who felt they had a stake in the paper’s future and were appreciated.

Many successful UK companies have long recognised that trade unions have a key role to play in maintaining productivity levels. The more mature of them see unions more as partners and stakeholders rather than social adversaries. Healthy industrial relations between management and workers can often reduce the potential for basic disagreements spiralling out of control.

The opposite of this could be observed this week by P&O Ferries, owned by Dubai-based DP World, who sacked 800 of their British workforce without warning by video link. The UK Government’s initial reaction was to describe P&O’s actions as “extreme”, as though it were merely at one end of a recognisable scale of industrial behaviours.

DP World is one of the world’s richest companies, possessing huge cash reserves and making billions in annual revenue. This allows it to pay eye-watering dividends to the Dubai royal family who are among their shareholder-owners. It's been reported DP World received over £30m in emergency Covid funding from UK tax-payers last year.

This firm will also have noted the route of travel in recent years of the UK’s industrial relations map and seen that it operates on the basis of “no great mischief if they fall”.

READ MORE KEVIN: Scottish Labour? Don't get your hopes up

And besides, as the economic iniquities of Covid have inter-locked with record fuel price highs and unprecedented energy hikes many people are beginning to experience a degree of sympathy fatigue. There’s also a sense that this most supine iteration of the UK Labour Party seems slightly embarrassed by traditional trade union activism.

The P&O management’s conduct here is simply an extreme manifestation of what’s been happening elsewhere across the UK. Despite sporadic bursts of outrage the practice of fire and re-hire continues virtually unchallenged in the private sector.

Assorted applications of the gig economy such as zero-hours contracts and black-listing are now justified by phrases like “the new economic reality” and “change management”. It all contributes to the notion that to have any kind of job is a privilege and that anything in the way of job security and workplace dignity is a luxury.

In Scotland, last year the ruling SNP group used words like ‘fascist’ to describe trade union activists leading strike action by bin-workers following years of appalling conditions and 18 months of risking their lives providing essential services during the pandemic. Similar, irresponsible rhetoric was used to defame workers in the recent London Underground strike. The fire and re-hire tactics of British Gas betrayed similar Dickensian, master/serf attitudes.

The pattern of press ownership across the UK where the biggest-selling newspaper groups are owned by a handful of billionaires and landed aristocrats encourages Victorian workplace principles. This was most sinisterly evident during the 1984-85 Miners' Strike when MI5 deployed agents provocateur within the NUM to provide the UK tabloids with false and malicious accusations of corruption against Arthur Scargill.

To its eternal shame, Tony Blair’s Labour administration did little to unpick the anti-union legislation of Margaret Thatcher. There’s a reason why Sharon Graham, following her appointment as General Secretary of Unite last August moved quickly to remove the union from the Labour Party’s orbit.

Last night she laid bare the scale of DP World’s iniquity in its treatment of the P&O workers: “Despite recording profits that fund billionaire lifestyles, Dubai-based DP World has launched a pre-meditated ‘economic attack’ on British workers, showing once again that our system is broken. The political elite have been in the pocket of billionaires for decades, supporting their demands to weaken the rights of their own citizens in favour of corporate profiteering.

“This is the result: 800 ordinary workers from Britain sacked whilst working at sea, by a firm owned by the Dubai Royal Family. It’s time to bring the oligarchs and monopolies that run so much of our global economy to heel. Our politicians have failed. I’ve instructed £10m to be allocated to a new campaign fund. If any employer attacks my members in a similar way, then then no action will be ruled out.”

The P&O action against its workforce is only an extension of how workers are viewed by corporate Britain and the UK’s boutique left: as little more than the disposable components of a machine.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.