Go to a restaurant, or a hotel. Look around. You’ll notice a distinct lack of something.
Employees? No. Quality Service? Hopefully not?
The answer is British people. The man carrying your luggage probably hails from Eastern Europe. The sommelier has come from Turkey. The lady cleaning the toilet in your room may well be from Brazil. So why is no-one striking for them?
One of the most British things imaginable, horse racing, employs a significant number of Poles, Arabs, etc. Not too many British people. So why aren’t people on the streets for them?
Why does no-one care that, in this service economy, that we’re being serviced by immigrants, yet people are prepared to go on wildcat strikes when Britons can’t get jobs in energy? Are the unions so full of double standards that they can complain about foreign people getting jobs in the energy sector while they get served the sandwiches at their functions by young Eastern European immigrants?
Well, the answer is simple. They only care when others do what they would do themselves. How many members of Unite would scrub a toilet? How many would work 12-hour shifts serving drunks at a Christmas party? Not a single one.
The problem with the British jobs market isn’t a lack of jobs, it’s a lack of acceptable jobs. So many people wouldn’t consider so many jobs. The energy sector hasn’t lost jobs. Some just went abroad – which with free movement of labour is totally A-OK. Therein lies the problem at Lindsay Oil Refinery. A contract went to a company from abroad who have their own dedicated workforce to do, wait for it, exactly what the contract was for. Were any other company given the tender then they would have had to employ people, and mainly employ British workers – pushing up the time it would take to do the job, and pushing up the cost of it. In essence, they have gone on strike because a contract was given to the most merit-worthy applicant.
Of course, this ignores the unspoken element – Rrace. This isn’t a strike because someone was more meritorious than others. It’s a strike because those with merit are those without British passports. But it’s also wrong to point fingers. You can’t tar these workers with a broad sweep of racism. To do that would only make this situation far worse. Instead, we’ve got to point the fingers at the Unions, who say in public that they can’t support wildcat strikes, yet read between the lines and everyone knows full well they aren’t just supporting this, they’re encouraging this. How else would these strikes spread with such geographical spontaneity?
Over the coming days, people will talk more about British jobs for British people, they’ll talk about sticking barriers around our labour market. If they carry it through, it would be catastrophic – wages would fall, or prices would rise – both at unhealthy rates.
The British economy cannot hope to function without a steady influx of foreign workers, our lives would be hard pressed to function without it. Rig the labour market towards British workers and you would find that many menial jobs would go unfilled, the foreign workers that came in the good times would be forced out of the economy. British jobs for British people ignore that there’s a lot of jobs British people aren’t prepared to do and you cannot change that attitude overnight.
Jobs should go to the best people for them, wherever they may hail from. If you break that central tenet of the jobs market, then we all will suffer.
* Rich Wilson is a Liberal Democrat member living in Sale.
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12 Comments
Pernicious, hypocritical nonsense, which of course is what we would expect from “LibDemS”.(How hard it is to spit out that dreadful word describing Gladstone’s once great party – oh how he must turn in his grave) Let’s just get this straight now that you’ve jumped on the bash-the-ignorant-racist-working-classes-bandwagon. It is not the case that people do not want “bad” jobs and cede them to the abused foreigner. It is simply this: PEOPLE WANT TO EARN A LIVING WAGE. Give up what you are doing and go and get yourself a real job in the real economy as two-thirds of the country is doing and you might come some way to understanding this. The idea of “social dumping” (as the French call it) is well-summed up in this whole episode: get some even more desperate, immiserated people in to do the job and -hey presto- we can have an unsustainable ten-year boom!
I’m afraid I have to disagree with a large part of this posting. Liberal Democrats can be perceived as having their heads in the clouds and in this instance your forehead certainly is.
The main point is that the principle of globalisation is all well and good (and there really is no alternative) unless we want a slump although we have the wrong tax rates to make what you say work (something that the Lib Dems would do something about)
Anonymous is right in one respect – the downsides of globalisation has fallen on the lower skilled and as a party we need to recognise that. Only today I have spoken to an ex-constituent who has been thrown out of work after 21 years with one company only to find that it’s likely that the employment protection insurance he took out was probably worthless due to the way the DWP system operates (take a job at NMW or else you may lose your home!).
I think Vince Cable is great but we have to really keep our ear to the ground (no not take the BNP stance who are milking this for all they are worth) but taking a hard-headed view of taxation, the benefits system and the fact that the reason why so many people can do these sorts of jobs is because they don’t have the mortgages nor family expenses that British people have.
For instance in the calculations it’s never shown that someone from Poland say on NMW is really getting £15 an hour as after rent, bills and entertainment all the money goes to buy a house in Poland. An ex-neighbour of mine did just that after working many hours in Silver service and on the airlines. He actually bought a house where he comes from.
“The energy sector hasn’t lost jobs. Some just went abroad – which with free movement of labour is totally A-OK.”
Brillaint idea. Can we have some Poles and Indians or whoever in to replace the rubbish politicians running the country and the equally bad ones that would like to run the country?
How about “decent jobs for decent workers” & “decent workers for decent jobs”? Both of those are policies Brown has done sod all to promote.
I’m afraid I find the problem a whole lot simpler. For more than a generation now we have failed to equip our youngsters with the qualifications they need to allow them to do the jobs they want to provide the decent standard of living they deserve.
Whose responsible? Poor educational services and a teaching profession that is riddled with incompetents – and the Lib Dems are the party of teachers, so let’s not expect any radical policies from us! The number of schools that fail to give children the minimal educational qualifications they need is frightening.
But what the hell, so long as teachers are politically correct, what does it matter? No doubt that’s a discussion they regularly have with their Slovakian Au Pairs.
I’m very much on board with this article. There are many reasons why people of Britain find themselves jobless right now. Some of it is down to poor governance, lack of appropriate education and skills training. A small part of it will be down to complex tax and benefit systems. Some will definitely be down to people not being willing to take shit jobs if that’s all they can get. But it almost certainly isn’t anything to do with the free movement of workforce. Not directly, not before these other factors.
Well yes, the first ‘anonymous’ is right when he says that people want to earn a living wage. That’s the nub of it.
And the big factor in Lindsey is that a whole swathe of jobs has gone wholesale to a large number of overseas workers. If you want to work in a hotel, there’s nothing to stop a Briton from applying, but I understand that in this contract it just ain’t possible. And the great mass of people in this country don’t want to see this magnified a hundredfold.
This isn’t a race issue – not yet, though some would like to make it so. If the jobs had gone to Australians it woould still have been an issue.
The future of Europe has simply got to be better than seeing your local jobs being taken by people from hundreds of miles away living on an accomodation barge – or from the other perspective, having to live hundreds of miles from home and being the guy who is on that barge.
Helpful site. I just came across another interesting website on the current economic downturn and employment: http://www.recessioninfocenter.com
A lot of the problem has got to be the unemployability of many British workers. They are often rude, poorly educated and underskilled. British employers prefer foreign workers because they actually want to work. Also, we need to start making so-called menial jobs pay better. My elderly mother has a carer to visit her every day and without exception they are African. Yet this is precisely the kind of job our own unskilled workforce would be doing if they weren’t sat watching daytime TV and breeding illegitimate children. If we cut taxes for the low-paid (something the Tories totally failed to do, the incentives to work will come back. Incentives for the low paid are actually just as important to get right as for the high paid.
If we cut taxes for the low-paid (something the Tories totally failed to do, the incentives to work will come back. Incentives for the low paid are actually just as important to get right as for the high paid.
Amen to that – after all we all know how wonderful the policy of ensuring we don’t disincentivise `our best people` has been.
Without a radical reform of the tax and benefits systems I don’t think that we can really move on from the current crisis.
Tories and Labour just perpetuate the problems
Tories – `don’t rock the boat too much think of our core supporters`
Labour – `don’t rock the boat too much think of our core supporters – it there’s a problem with the system it must be the person to blame`
Lib Dems – Let’s rock the boat – if there’s a problem with the system let’s change the system
I agree with your main point that jobs should go to the best people, but it simply isn’t true that the problem in the UK jobs market is only that the available jobs aren’t acceptable. According to the ONS, there are more than twice as many people looking for jobs as there are jobs available. The idea that the problem can be solved by tinkering with the supply of workers – giving them more qualifications, interview training etc – is a big lie which Labour uses to disguise the fact that it doesn’t know how to go about creating the jobs that are needed. We Lib Dems mustn’t be conned into believing them.
If you are an employer, and you have the choice between someone from this country in the lowest quartile of ability, and someone from another country in the top or second quartile, who do you pick? I think it obvious, even if it’s an unskilled manual job.
Is it the prime duty of the government of this country to protect the interests of the citizens of this country? Does that mean all of the citizens, or does it exclude those who fall in its lower quartile of ability?
That is the problem – there are large numbers of people in this country whom you would not wish to employ if you can get bright and eager immigrants from other countries, and you can, as this is a wealthier country than many others. There will always be people who are not very able, lacking in intellectual or emotional intelligence. So what is to be done with those people?