Rjan:
att:
Yes, it is rudeness…I have seen a few places go from all natives to EE over the last 5 years.
I get on with most people and like having a laugh and have many times asked EE people why they want to live in such an awful country (I have a house in Portugal) Most of them tell me they are just doing it to make some money and then return in 10 years.
So far so good.
Once the places become all EE, most of the banter stops and they seem to close up and do as they like, when they like, the communication becomes difficult and sparse and it has dawned on me that I do not like going to these places any longer.
But that is not rudeness, it is probably just a function of the fact that in a predominantly EE environment, you start to get workers drawn in who speak little or no English but can get by in their job without it, which you wouldn’t get in a mostly English environment because such workers wouldn’t be able to operate effectively.
There is also, as I say, a category of worker who can speak English when put on the spot to do so, but don’t feel confident enough about it to enjoy conversation with strangers. The perceived stakes are raised, of course, when you’re around people who might react harshly to poor English rather than being indulgent.
I’ve certainly seen EE guys given a hard time about their (truly) poor English for no good reason - an example I have in mind stands out to me because, even in plain English, it was often difficult to communicate with office staff who seemed to think that because they understood the situation themselves that everybody else automatically would through telepathy.
I have had conversation with English, about how they feel they are being forced out etc. I have witnessed it in many places and it is unfair on the English.
I am not racist, I just say it how I have experienced it and it has been mostly negative.
I don’t personally have anything “positive” to say about speaking to people who don’t have good English, since there is nothing good about struggling to communicate, although at times I do find it amusing to hear unusual turns of phrase that are clear in meaning but which native speakers wouldn’t use.
But I haven’t generally encountered any of the rudeness or interpersonal negativity you describe - certainly not out of proportion to what is the norm for natives, including snotty office staff in general, and also the fact that sometimes doing long hours in crap jobs leaves people in a bad mood (without implying anything about their normal character or their views about the person stood in front of them).
More often than not, if people are a bit quiet to begin with but can speak English, once they realise you’re friendly and not there to give them a hard time, people loosen up and become a bit more sociable, which probably doesn’t happen if they can see irritation or exasperation written over your face from the outset, similar to how most toddlers learning to talk would probably keep out of your way if you tried to talk about War and Peace and then became visibly ■■■■■■ off when they couldn’t immediately understand.
And nobody is forcing the English out except the bosses themselves. You seem to think, as many do, that somehow just being from a foreign country means that you get to hire yourself into a job - forgetting that British bosses make decisions about hiring foreign workers in the same way they do about natives, and that a business owner with likely a solid British ancestry has decided to hire someone with broken (or no) English over someone with good English, generally because someone with good English would expect to be paid more.
The influx of EEs has nothing to do with any malign agenda on the part of EEs, and everything to do with bosses who know they can force down wages, and the answer is to turn against bosses who operate on that thinking and resist any constraints, not against other workers who are just earning a living and certainly didn’t devise any scheme to force down the wages of Brits in the way that bosses devise such schemes.
You can tell the difference between whether a person is scheming or not because if you said to EEs that bosses had to hire them on the same rate as a Brit, they wouldn’t object, and certainly wouldn’t bring any political power to bear against it, because they don’t have any appreciable political power in Britain.
Whereas if you tell bosses that the low-pay gravy train is over and that they can’t undercut wages with foreign workers, there’ll be howls of anguish from employers’ associations, and the Tory party which represents them will refuse to enact any such change. 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.
Thanks, Mr Tressell. 
