Conor:
ripperman:
…
EU workers have never taken anyone’s job. That’s a load of crap. What they have done is apply for and get work that British people decided they didn’t want to do.
Isn’t the reason that British people have decided they don’t want to do it, because the pay and/or conditions offered in those instances is utter crap?
Those jobs existed for anyone to take up, they didn’t go “oh here’s a Pole without a job, let’s create one for them”.
I agree the problem is not that bosses create special jobs for Poles (or others).
What they do is just advertise the existing job at less than the rate it’s currently being done at.
Nowadays the bosses do this habitually - it’s what the Tory government means when it talks of millions of job vacancies, or the haulage lobby means when it says they’re 50k drivers short. They’re actually not a single head short.
Employers and recruiters basically have everyone’s existing jobs posted as vacancies, constantly, but at a lower rate than they are currently paying the jobholder (or which their competitors are paying a jobholder).
The “lower rate” might also encompass poorer conditions, or being managed by less competent management.
What they’ve found in certain sectors is that a lot of workers from Eastern Europe take the bait and bite at these lower rates offered, and they keep biting at pay rates or under conditions which settled British workers would consider rank exploitation or outrageous maltreatment.
They bite for various reasons. Sometimes you have trained doctors and engineers working in food factories because they see the time spent as maybe the only opportunity to acquire English language and culture, which will serve them in their long-term careers here (or elsewhere in the Anglophone world, or in academia) - so they have a long-term plan that is served by working temporarily for low pay, in a way that obviously it is not for native English speakers (English doctors and engineers will go straight into more fitting work, and English food factory workers want nothing less than a decent day’s pay from day one, as they do not need any extra English skills or have any other temporary trade-off).
Temporary foreign workers meanwhile - those who are not settling here permanently - may be arbitraging between currency rates, or the cost of housing - getting paid almost British levels of wages, but spending most of the proceeds back home where many essentials including housing cost far less. They may also be putting up with absurd conditions that no sensible worker could sustain throughout their lives, but only temporarily before they return to more sedate or family-friendly jobs back home.
Whatever the reason, it is not that the settled British worker has suddenly been afflicted with a terrible laziness, but simply that the bosses have found that they don’t need to pay a proper British wage for certain jobs, and so they aren’t, and therefore they aren’t attracting any willing British worker to those jobs. At best, they will get a demotivated and sullen British worker, in contrast to the eager foreign worker.
Over time then, certain sectors become swamped with foreign workers because the pay and conditions on offer are simply not sufficient for a British worker looking to work permanently in that occupation.
, but we have a guy whose almost crippled with spinal issues yet he still manages to avoid being a drain on society by actually going to work and pay into the system. I’ll leave it there.