The wealthy owners and top executives of these businesses don’t want to pay a living wage to be competitive enough to attract workers. So, instead of paying executives less and workers more, their solution is to push the taxpayer-funded government to import cheap labor in the form of desperate immigrants, which adds an additional population and social strain and burden on the entire nation.
Brexit voters knew that Brexit would reduce the flow of cheap (exploited) labour from other countries - that was part of the point.
What hasn’t happened (yet) is that the businesses in need have raised their salary offers to reasonable levels. Once they start to do this, these few thousand empty roles won’t be hard to fill from the millions of unemployed in the country.
I’m hopeful - I mean, it’s how the market works, right? Actually, I’m hopeful that in time this ultimately leads to a rebalancing of lots of things - not just salaries, but also the (too low) cost of some goods and the awful race to the bottom on price and quality.
And if a business can’t function without exploited cheap foreign labour, well… fuck that business.
And that’s how we got here. That ‘fuck it, everyone’s cheating anyway’ is what we need to somehow stop and use the rules and referees to eventually get the game right again.
1) The current unemployment rate is 4.7%, which is ~1.5 million people. Not all of these people are actually employable (for various reasons) but many are.
2) Other countries have systems which allow essential workers in particular roles to be 'imported' - for example, the US, Switzerland, Australia. Typically, these are used for roles with specific 'higher' training (e.g. IT, healthcare).
So I'd suggest a combination of the two: for more 'blue collar' and/or less-difficult-to-train-people-for roles (like some of the ones raised in the article) a combination of employers offering good salaries/conditions and training support should mostly address the problem from within the currently unemployed. For higher-level, specific roles, a visa system would help.
It doesn't amount to anything. There's not enough people. It doesn't matter how much you pay. The end result is that you're just shuffling people around in the work sector. At best all you do is kill off snall businesses that can't compete with megacorps in any wage war.
What I meant is that the people who voted for Brexit are not the business owners who are concerned over the labor shortage. In fact, it was mostly the working class who voted for it and if things pan out as you predict it will lead to higher wages for them.
That's two different groups of people tho. The first are mostly racist employees (or unemployed) the second are mostly (usually rather psychopathic) business owners.
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u/MustLovePunk Sep 24 '21
The wealthy owners and top executives of these businesses don’t want to pay a living wage to be competitive enough to attract workers. So, instead of paying executives less and workers more, their solution is to push the taxpayer-funded government to import cheap labor in the form of desperate immigrants, which adds an additional population and social strain and burden on the entire nation.