Stanley Knife:
Rjan:
And nobody is forcing the English out except the bosses themselves . . .
. . . That’s how you identify where the real problem lies, by the fact that those with power are willing the situation to stay as it is.
This is where the left’s reasoning falls flat on its face. You cannot lay the blame for poor wages purely at the feet of business leaders whilst arguing that the UK should be in the EU, an organisation which has, as one of its basic tenets, the free movement of people. Cut the supply off and the bosses choices are reduced leading to an improvement in wages, terms and conditions.
But the bosses want the supply on!
That being the case, you’re not going to cut the supply off by harassing some individual, hard-of-speaking European migrant who doesn’t even make decisions - not even day-to-day decisions about hiring, let alone political decisions about the terms on which Britain conducts economic trade with the rest of the world. Most migrants don’t even have a vote here for god’s sake - but bosses do, and so do native workers.
And the point is, you can tackle the problem without becoming completely insular or hostile to foreign workers. If you want an increase in wages to ensure that they are good enough for British workers, and if you want secure steady jobs, legislate them into being - like they did in the period roughly 1945-1980 - set wages through wage councils, abolish agency labour and the hiring of workers by-the-day, attack (with additional regulations) businesses that undercut the going rates, and so on.
It’s not even as though these things are wild socialist policies, and a blast from the past by the standards of today - Germany and France have them now to a far greater degree than we do, and so do most other EU countries. The last wage council in Britain, the agricultural wages board, I think has only just been abolished in the past year or two - under the Tory government! The minimum wage in agriculture has existed for almost all of living memory, and latterly has been much higher than the national minimum wage. The Tories abolished every other wage council in the 80s or early 90s (I forget specifically), at the same time as they attacked unions and other employment laws which protected pay and conditions.
And you won’t be surprised to hear, which is one of the sectors with the highest number of migrant workers working long hours doing manual labour for what natives would perceive as poor pay for that kind of work? Agriculture. They claim they can’t attract native workers because wages are already too low (since even the wage council rate covered all agricultural work, not all of which is quite so back-breaking as the typical kind of work done by migrants), and then the means by which wages could be increased, they abolish.
It’s like I’ve said before, the only advantage foreign workers have over native workers is typically that they will do the same for less. We don’t need to become a closed country - all we need to do, is remove wage rates from the bargaining that occurs between native and foreign workers.
Once bosses are presented with the stark choice of, do you want to pay the same wages regardless, but do you want someone who speaks good English or someone who speaks bad English, it’s stops making any sense to prefer to hire the migrant with bad English - whereas at the moment, if the employer is saving even as little as £20 a day and can hire and fire at will, he doesn’t care if it takes an extra few minutes to communicate or if a native worker ends up on the dole.
Or, once bosses have to offer permanent contracts to workers, and start investing in training that improves productivity, the stark choice for the bosses will be, do you want a permanent worker who will be here for the long run repaying the investment you make in his skills and development, or do you want a migrant who will sit through several weeks training, but then be leaving in 6 months to return to their country?
That’s all that needs to happen, for employment laws to be strengthened, and there isn’t a single EU law that can prevent Britain from doing it, because in general we’d only be matching the sort of employment and industrial protections that exist in other EU countries.
Migration will taper off because once workers have to make a long-term commitment to a specific place, the possibility of moving country for a few months or years for better wages disappears. You either have to move country and settle permanently for the long-term - which is not what most people want to do for an extra couple of pounds an hour (any more so than the average Brit moves home and hikes around Britain for just a few extra pounds an hour, with all the risks and disruption it entails) - or you won’t be able to move and find work.
Again, this is not about being anti-foreigner or any sort of cultural rejection - it’s about reinforcing stable communities with stable jobs, to which foreigners are welcome to come if they want to come for the long-term, and if bosses want additional workers then they either compete on the open market for the workers that are available in the locality, or they open new workplaces in areas where unemployed workers reside, not expecting workers to hike around the country or the continent in order to find jobs, and certainly not expecting to import foreign workers wholesale, not to meet demand for additional bums on seats that can’t be found locally, but simply to drive down pay for the local workforce that is already doing the job.
