Massive rises in unemployment: Do we need to talk about Eva?
- Thread starter treelover
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London_Calling
Pleasant and unpatronising
They all dislike Romanians, even Romanians. The rest of your post makes you a clueless cunt.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Racism isn't the only trap in territory like this though. Im interested in a much wider set of divisions than that, and other isms such as nationalism and protectionism. I don't claim to have any impressive answers either, I have my own traps to contend with. Namely that certain liberal, non-divisive, internationalistic & world solidarity type stuff has been mangled by virtue of international capitalism stealing some of its stripes, and using this stuff to bind people into a very specific form of global interdependence which serves certain interests far more than others.
It depends who you're talking about and what age group they fall into.
And you still haven't said who your 'people of the east' are.
London_Calling
Pleasant and unpatronising
The thread is about youth unemployment. I'm not talking about specific nationalities.
If your talking about Eastern Europe then English is very widely spoken and in the Soviet era they produced more graduates than Western Europe, they certainly aren't more badly educated than the British, if anything they tend to better educated ime.
Dr Dolittle
Slightly loony
Yes, they're prepared to work for a low wage because they don't want to come all the way to Britain and be unable to get work. As for your stuff about building solidarity with foreign workers for a better wage, do you want the whole of Europe to go bankrupt, or for unemployment to go even higher? Because that's what would happen if wages were forced up in a recession. Though I do think that everyone should have the right to join a trade union.
'Our response'? Who are 'we'? In the firm where my wife works, she's one of only three who are actually in a union, which the firm doesn't recognise, and that's only in the offices. Down in the warehouse the lads born and bred here, let alone the foreign workers, are too scared to join a union or aren't interested. And nobody wants to get them interested anyway.
Where I work the picture's slightly better but similar. This is what today's private sector is like.
London_Calling
Pleasant and unpatronising
What has "Soviet era" anything to do with an 18-year old arriving on a bus tomorrow with enough money for 4 weeks and English that newly arrived Africans laugh at?
It demonstrates that the education system in eastern europe is far better than you appear to appreciate.
Paulie Tandoori
shut it you egg!
if this thread is about youth unemployment (not something immediately apparent from the o/p), then its worth pointing out that a recent financial times blog examined a number of factors including immigration from Eastern Europe, the extension of NMW, etc but postulated that the most persuasive explanation appears to be the shift in focus of job centres from young people (under the New Deal for Young People, for eg) to lone parents and those claiming IB. another perhaps unintentional impact of knee jerk welfare reforms?
Eastern European societies still have the legacy of the Communist-run era's high educational standards.
You always ask questions but never provide answers, its a bit tiresome to be honest
London_Calling
Pleasant and unpatronising
I'm experiencing it now, in south London. Every day.
I live in South London and know parts of Eastern Europe very well and don't recognise your description. Sure there are some who are badly educated with poor English but that certainly isn't true of the majority of young East Europeans ime.
I do that as well, but that's because really there probably are no answers, or at least ones that could conceivably be implemented. Hell in a handcart and all that.
Nah, you do explain your reasoning and provide opinions for a whole range of things; treelover doesn't even do that.
JimW
支那暗杀团
There has been progress though - they've motorised the cart.
here its an LPG cart, and round your way its coal fired.
Luckily it will be an electric cart by the time the oil gets too expensive to extract.
All gets a bit like chasing your tail in the end.
Says Mr middle-classed false dichotomy. You fucking stupid cunt.
Never said it was, did I? Just countering London Wanking's repetition of that shite meme concerning a supposed moral gap between immigrants and workers native to his country, which just doesn't stand up to the rather complex reality of immigrant's class background, levels of education, skills, hopes, relationships with themselves, other immigrants, and people they work side by side with. And also, that he has no fucking clue about eastern Europe, the bullshitting cunt. I know a little bit, but at its farthest reaches geographically. Another group of people the Poles don't like much.
sihhi
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered
If you don't accept the lump of labour fallacy why are you mentioning East Europeans.
If you were actually serious about this you'd want to discuss East European unemployment - it's at 20-25% in Latvia for everyone, Bydgoscz is "a nothing place" according to 25 year old Poles.
Ghanaian, Latin American and Congolese people work in hotels too. What is the East Europe obsession amongst the Keynesianists? Is it a way of saying 'I'm can't be a racist, I only want white non-British people to be barred from employment in Britain'?
An associate is doing this kind of unpaid work from the JobCentre for Marie Curie Cancer. The best thing is to work as s-l-o-w-l-y as possibly collective strike action is not there.
Poundland have eight different levels of employee with different T&Cs in one site (not including these JobCentre people).
Anyone else think this kind of post is divide-and-rule?
scifisam
feck! arse! girls! drink!
It's not a 'fact.' It's your interpretation of one of your friend's opinions of her English workers. Tobyjug fact, maybe.
Migrant workers in all professions have a better work ethic than the average stay-at-home worker (and this applies to all countries), because only the ones that have a bit of get-up-and-go, er, get up and go. But that doesn't mean Brits are lazy workers.
Also, only the ones without caring responsibilities back home can move abroad to work. Disabilities make it a lot harder too - not impossible, but far more difficult, depending on the disability. With migrant workers you are not seeing the average person and you are certainly not seeing the people that had it the hardest in their home countries.
I was a migrant worker myself briefly, as a teenager in Spain, and then in Berlin for a few months. One group of Irish people I knew in Berlin lived 13 people in a very small studio flat and I stayed with them for a couple of weeks (paying rent - negligible rent like the rest, which is why they lived like this). Some worked days, some worked nights.
Finding your shoes in the morning required climbing over multiple recumbent bodies, searching through all the stuff, and making things even messier for the next person who needed to find their own shoes and clothes. It was mostly fairly fit young women and young men of pretty similar sizes, so there was a certain amount of clothes-sharing going on, or at least you weren't that bothered whose t-shirt it was you found, but you had to have your own shoes or you'd end up with blisters after a long shift at jobs which generally required being on your feet all day/night.
People took to sleeping with their shoes in the bottom of their rucksacks, with their more special clothing (particular t-shirts or a really warm jumper, etc) on top of them to make it more comfortable. It became like living in your rucksack, not just out of it. That's not the kind of thing you live with long-term. You can't. We coped with it because we knew it was short-term, we were young, and it saved a hell of a lot of money.
All of us at the cafe/bar we worked in were British or Irish because it was easier to have everyone speaking the same language and it was such a touristy area that English was starting to be more useful than German. In the restaurant area, however, everyone was Sri Lankan; as the only fluent German and English speaker, I ended being promoted to chef purely because I could work with both the cafe/bar and restaurant staff. (I learnt pretty much all of my cooking skills there).
Two of the restaurant workers slept in the kitchens under the counters at night. My shifts were irregular, and I was young and partying a lot; I could actually manage being of no fixed abode, temporarily - I slept in the park next to the restaurant when I wasn't sleeping at friends' houses or with the Huge Pile of Irish People.
Anyone who thinks being a migrant worker in an unskilled or semi-skilled job doesn't change the wages of the locals has never actually been that migrant worker. I know I undercut the wages of the local Berliners, and I know the local cafe and bar workers from Eastern Europe are doing the same, and I don't blame them any more than I do myself.
This is not 'oh, poor me!' I had a fantastic time. The inconveniences were vastly outweighed by the financial savings and it helped that we were all in it together. But we all knew that we were not going to be doing this day, in day out, for all our working lives.
Unionisation might actually help, per Blagsta's post. And I mean it would help everybody.
sihhi
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered
Nice use of the meaningless empty but massive-scale threat there.
Sidney Hook would be proud.
What a knob. 
Surely, whether 'Keynesians' or not, people treat east european immigrant labour differently because it's come about suddenly, and for different reasons than previous waves in that it's part of being in the European single market that treats us all as one big country to all intents and purposes. That and the fact that unlike foreign labour from elsewhere, this is a temporary phenomenon. Most east Europeans have no intention of settling permanently but are here to make money that will go a lot further at home (you can't blame them) and are generally better educated than most workers who do menial jobs from elsewhere, as well as compared to indiginous workers, due to the fact that they are, at home, from professional occupations. It's common to get people working on the tills and in warehouses who trained to be doctors or lawyers at home. So it isn't posts on messageboards that divide and rule but the system in itself. The TUC and union activists can make all the noises they want, but in a situation like the one I describe above, they're nowhere to be seen. You can't unionise the foreign workers in places where unions aren't recognised and nobody wants to risk sticking their neck out, least of all the east European worker who wants to make a packet and be off.
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