desypete:
would you care to have a stab at answering the question about how the driving game would be right now if there was no eu nationals able to come over here ?
Better than now, but worse than if an increase of wages was mandated by law.
the unions were trying to sell the idea its nothing at all to do with high number of migrants and that its all about bosses who exploit it.
Which is true. Migrants do not apply any pressure to bosses to pay settled workers less. Bosses themselves are generally seeking ways to suppress wages as a first principle of management, and hauliers that do suppress wages apply competitive pressure to those who do not.
In other words, the pressure to reduce wages comes from bosses trying to increase profits, and from the threat that other bosses in the same line of work will undercut.
I agree that restricting the supply of cheap labour would cause market prices to go up, but that can be done more specifically with a sector minimum wage. Cheap settled workers (such as the unemployed desperate for work) are as much a threat to wages as cheap migrant workers.
It’s worth pointing out that wages have fallen through the floor even in many occupations that have not had a large influx of immigrants. Better minimum wages in other occupations would also improve drivers’ bargaining power.
as the reason why its all in the mess it is, they were trying to tell us that the eu protects us and our rights ? even though no bugger wants the dcpc or many of the other rules and regs forced on us, so clealry the unions are well out of touch with what the workers really wants of feels
Unfortunately rules and regulations are necessary in this game. The EU did not mandate that drivers pay for the CPC - the government could have imposed a levy on industry and offered them free to drivers.
yet it seems perfectly normal to me to think if you stop the flow of cheap labour then what can the bosses do ? they will have to share bigger slices of the pie to attract drivers into the game, wages for the workers will have to go up to attract into the industry.
(bangs head against wall). Then why aren’t you supporting a higher minimum wage? Why is that not a perfectly normal thought, that if the flow of cheap labour is stopped by having a high minimum wage, then bosses (and their customers) will have no choice but to pay that wage to get work done?
and it will of been brought about not by the unions but by the simple man or women in the street who refused to listen to the experts, refused to listen to the jumped up unions and refused to listed to all the doom rubbish, they instead worked it out in there own heads, shutting the doors will = more slices of the pie for them, better conditions for them, more homes will become available once the buggers go back home. its not to hard to work out. but the unions, the political correct lot and the experts all got it wrong and the people themselves made this change. so who the hell needs a union ?
But we know from past experience that beggar-thy-neighbour does not lead to a bigger slice of the pie for workers. That’s why 1930s workers were marching for food (pre-EU with strong borders), and 1960s workers weren’t (during the ascendancy of the EU).
What has changed since is not that the world’s working class has become too friendly, but that there has been a loss of working class solidarity and state regulation of the markets which was the norm post-WW2. In other words, the working man has fallen back into 1930s ignorance.
Sections of the working class, guided subtly by the mouthpieces of the ruling class, are starting to fight each other again on the mutual assumption that they will be better off doing so, whilst the ruling class exploit the disunity to make bumper profits.
It’s as though people honestly believe that more goals are scored, easier and more assuredly, in a football match when the teams are competing, than if they cooperated. Imagine a match in which the losing team stood to be made homeless and have their lives turned upside down, how easy do you think it would be to score a goal? Would anyone even follow the rules in this life-or-death match?
With cooperation, the same (or better) outcome can be fixed for a fraction of the effort and none of the risk - the number of goals can be planned, and the process of achieving them routine and undemanding for the players (leaving people with time to spend on other things besides life-or-death football, and able to get on with life and spend time with the kids without having to fear losing the game and those kids being put on the street). In essence, the economy had a large dose of this cooperation in the 1960s.
This is why the superficial equivalence (in terms of the effect on wages) of regulating geographic movement of workers, and regulating workers’ wages directly, is not equivalent in the final analysis.
The problem is, as two world wars showed, a significant minority of people are reluctant to put their brains into gear and make the distinction between two superficially plausible answers until after they or their children have been used as cannon fodder on battlefields.
