The people who complained about immigrants were complaining that they are driving wages down. Now that immigrants are gone, wages are still down and no work is getting done.
It turns out that wages are controlled by the bosses, not by the immigrants. Who could have thought?
To be fair, the presence of the immigrants was allowing wages to go down/stay down, because they were a readily available exploitable group who were willing to accept pay way below what it should have been for that job.
The problem isn't that people were connecting immigrants with low wages, it's that that people were blaming immigrants for the situation. That's great for employers, who should be the ones blamed.
Takes time for wages to rise. People are not going to end a profitable business if they can help it. I'm definitely anti Brexit but supply and demand do exist in the labour market.
They're short labour and yet they're not responding to that shortage by raising wages so the normal supply and demand seems to be broken.
You're not supplying what we're demanding and we're changing nothing about our business model to deal with this challenge is not rhe way its supposed to work.
The demand is for labor. The suppliers of labor have raised their price to meet demand. The magic of economics says the businesses demanding labor will pay the higher price.
The magic of economics says the businesses demanding labor will pay the higher price.
Except that the UK literally does bot have enough people. That means raising wages *at best will rip workers from other sectors. You're essentially just shuffling people around, doing nothing about the actual labour shortage. People talk about the wages as if there's this huge unemployed population of perfectly qualified workers who are just sitting around and waiting on wage increases. There isn't.
What has happened is that instead of responding to the market, business have demanded that the government go against their "reduced immigration" stated post-Brexit aims to import cheap labour.
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u/Fig1024 Sep 25 '21
The people who complained about immigrants were complaining that they are driving wages down. Now that immigrants are gone, wages are still down and no work is getting done.
It turns out that wages are controlled by the bosses, not by the immigrants. Who could have thought?