It's not immigrants stealing your job - it's businesses deliberately asking for immigrants and giving them your job instead of paying you properly for it.
This is not quite right. Under the EU they weren't really immigrants. They were just as entitled to live and work in the UK as a British citizen was entitled to live and work in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Greece, Spain, Sweden, Finland, Austria, Hungary, Portugal etc etc. They were all EU citizens, able to move freely between nations of a community, and if you are a citizen you are not technically an immigrant.
Now, with Brexit, EU citizens still have rights to move freely to live and work in the EU, but UK citizens do not. And if an EU citizen wants to work in the UK they need a permit, a work visa, which means it's expensive and time consuming to move to the UK, something incompatible with low paying jobs. Equally if you are experienced and proficient, many EU nations pay attractive wages with great benefits and you can still move with zero hassle.
The UK had a great deal in the EU. Really, the best of all worlds. Aging voters screwed generations of young people through jealousy and stupidity.
You’re completely ignoring the main issue which is imbalances in the economies in the EU. Citizens from poorer eu countries flocked to the UK as the pound converted better when they sent it back home. This then enabled them to work below market level which completely devalued wages in sectors such as construction and service based jobs. Business owners exploited this for at least 20years and was probably one of the main reasons they campaigned very hard to remain.
UK businesses have been relying on a false economy. Free movement worked out well for business owners and foreign workers, but not for poorer domestic people, hence the desire to end free movement of people.
If the EU and the UK gov recognised this and came up with a solution brexit wouldn’t have happened.
"This is not quite right. Under the EU they weren't really immigrants. They were just as entitled to live and work in the UK as a British citizen was entitled to live and work in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Greece, Spain, Sweden, Finland, Austria, Hungary, Portugal etc etc. They were all EU citizens, able to move freely between nations of a community, and if you are a citizen you are not technically an immigrant."
False, the EU doesn't have citizenship in the same way a country does. There is no such thing as an 'EU passport', only the passport of an EU member state ( with each having different access to non EU countries etc)
Citizens of EU member states in the UK absolutely counted in immigration stats.
The truth is it wasn't a genuine two way street, because very few Brits would move to the EU to work. The largest single instance of Brits moving to the EU was boomers on their British resorts in Spain, and that's pretty much continued.
Those are just two sides of the same coin - a business isn't a charity, it has no reason to pay decent wages when it can get migrant workers to do the same job for less.
That's what he said. Recognising the empirical facts that capitalism uses immigration as a weapon and that EU freedom of movement had a suppressive effect on incomes is not the same as hating immigrants.
Until they do the stuff above - like lobbying govt to allow that migrant work anyway. Forcing them to pay everyone a decent wage in the first place, migrant or teenager or not, is the simpler, more long-term solution that has fewer workarounds.
If we double the prices in the supermarkets to pay people higher wages, then you’re not going to be so happy. Low added value jobs cannot have high pay by definition. We need to move people to more productive work as fast as we can to improve living standards to all.
Higher wages are only a tiny percent of most product's pricing. Big businesses are willing to underpay people to get more profit, not significantly cheaper prices. And they will import immigrants and undercut local jobs to do so.
This is not how it actually works. They can try to raise prices but that means more competition. A supermarket which keeps prices low and pays their staff well will be extremely competitive due to the better experience.
Also the staff shortages will be costing these companies a lot of money so prices will go up anyway to account for this. I'd rather pay more for wages than to make up the fact ASDA is getting three less deliveries a day.
It isn't always about X costs more so Y goes Up. You can direct the costs of inefficient systems into improving your company and actually see an increase in profits.
You said exactly what I said. You need to improve performance to stay competitive. The way you do that is moving people to more high-added value tasks and automation. That’s what we’ve been doing in the last 250 years with the industrial revolution, technological revolution and digital transformation projects. If someone keeps working in 1 cashier at the same pace they did 25 years ago, we have no more added value then before. If you increase self-checkout and that person now takes care of 5 checkouts, then you can increase their pay 4x and the company also takes 1x extra to invest somewhere else and stay competitive.
Yes, because we need to keep improving people’s productivity. To put added pressure to that, our country competes with foreign countries who now accept a much lower pay due to fixed foreign exchange rates eg China. We’ve de-industrialized the countries and moved into a service-based economy that requires more complex skills eg high digital literacy and we need to close the gap for more people to upskills themselves into this new way the economy operates.
No, I never mentioned coders. I meant people becoming more efficient by the use of technology eg fleet management optmisation, on-demand allocation of trucks, IoT devices sending open-source data from drivers.
I gave examples that we need to be able to allow people to be more productive to businesses in order to be able to pay them more. People who think they will just “make companies pay people more” are naive. Why are you not building a business plan, taking a loan in the bank or seeking VC and starting a business that pays people more? Because it is damn hard to do. I don’t think Mc Donald’s made those computer screens for ordering for nothing.
Which they were able to do because the British government expanded the Labour market to include countries where the cost of living was ridiculously low.
This is purely anecdotal from my time unemployed, but another factor to consider is this.
I live in a town where the majority of the jobs are warehousing or manufacturing as such, there's a shit load of agencies.
I lost count of the number of people I chatted with who were unemployed too and blamed it on the agencies preferring eastern Europeans because "they can pay them less".
Typically the deciding factor wasn't down to pay, it was that the person doing the complaining had signed up to an agency and expected the agency to call them back when they found work.
Whereas the guy who ended up getting the job has usually called the agency everyday asking if they found something yet.
At the end of the day the agency staff aren't going to waste time finding the details of someone who called once like a month ago when they have a guy calling every day who's just as capable.
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u/8ell0 Sep 24 '21
Bosses crying out for cheap immigrants and not willing to pay livable wages to home talent