Will P&O Ferries get cancelled? 

 As the outrage over the P&O scandal reaches the point of inertia, here’s my (slightly disheartening) take:
 
We all saw the disturbing news of P&O Ferries sacking 800 people with no notice last week and the justifiable outrage it caused. We have seen protests from unions on the docks, captains refusing to leave their ships or let new crews (of underpaid foreign agency workers) onboard against a backdrop of unified condemnation from media, social media and across the political spectrum.  
 
But will this abhorrent treatment of workers impact P&O Ferries’ brand and profit? Sadly, I suspect not. Time and again we see big businesses bully workers and customers and get away with it.  
 
This is particularly true where a brand dominates a certain market; condemnation alone is not enough. Are consumers likely to wait for the next ferry rather than take a P&O one? Will freight companies endanger their already over-pressured supply lines? I suspect the answer to both these questions is ‘no’.  
 
The government seems reluctant to close these loopholes (‘fire and rehire’ is one of many) which begs the question; can consumers, media or campaigners have a real influence on brand behaviour?  
 
We’ve witnessed Wetherspoons’ mass sackings, Amazon’s mass-exploitation of workers, RyanAir’s decades of customer service horror stories, Google slyly but – perhaps- fittingly disavow its promise not to be evil, and Brewdog allegedly mistreat its own staff, undercut its supporters, and mislead the public, among a series of misdemeanours. 
 
Even Facebook, perhaps the most scandal-riven of Big Tech’s oligopoly, could ride out its bad PR with a simple rebrand.   
 
History is littered with examples, but even in the age of ‘cancel culture’ a PR scandal does not lastingly and damagingly impact brands that dominate their respective markets. 
 
We are all complicit. A company does something dreadful and we say ‘I will never give XXXXX my business again’ but within weeks or months, sometimes days – whether through necessity or convenience- we’re drawn back.  
 
And brands know this: in fact they rely on it. We joke that P&O’s PR department were first to go, but more accurately they probably took the view that, as long as their ferries are running, people have too few other options stop to using them. So, in pursuit of cost cuts and long-term financial salvation, they deemed the short-term outrage worth the bad PR.  
 
And so it will prove. In the corporate world, just as in the political, rhetoric and righteous outrage isn’t enough to make dominant brands behave. If things are ever going to change, then activism need to be channelled into a very clear purpose, whether that’s pressure on governments to change the law, intervene, or suffer at the ballot box.