The Workers Party of Britain denounces global logistics outfit XPO for sponging off public funds whilst racking up record profits, cutting furloughed workers’ pay by 20 percent and handing out glittering prizes to company directors.
Once more giving the lie to the mantra that “we’re all in it together”, the company is merrily dishing out £57 million bonus payments to its CEO, Bradley Jacobs, whilst its 25,000 British workers get nothing. To add insult to injury, the company refuses to even make good the 20 percent pay cut for its workers on furlough.
Yet the company is flush with cash globally, notching up $16.5 billion in revenue last year alone. And in its blind pursuit of maximum profit, XPO has plans to hive off the logistics wing of the company, rebrand it as GXO, and adopt an aggressive UK strategy of acquisitions, takeovers and asset-stripping. XPO already deals with transport and logistics for supermarket chains like Morrisons and Waitrose, works with online retailer ASOS and has recently won a five year government contract to service the UK Border Force.
Nor is that contract the only benefit enjoyed by XPO at public expense. It is estimated that XPO has received over £100 million in furlough payments from the government, plus more millions in business rates relief.
The company’s 25,000 workforce whose labour generates all the profits don’t get to see any of these billions and get no thanks for having risked their lives during the pandemic through management failure to introduce covid-safe measures at work. Last year the GMB compared working conditions at an XBO-run ASOS warehouse in Barnsley to labouring in a “satanic mill”, turning the workplace into “a cradle of disease”.
Under socialism, all the logistics and transport functions required in a modern society will be centrally planned, on the basis of need not profit, and not left to the vagaries of the market.