Posted by Klendathu
Here's how it works:
Ex 1/ British and US companies lose construction bids to Korean companies in Saudi Arabia, because the Korean companies' "workers" are actually soldiers on a pitance of military pay, doing their military service with "Dong-Ah" Construction Company, thus able to undercut normal workers and unable to have a day off without being subject to court martial. Hard to compete with soldiers being paid USD 100/Mo
Ex 2/ Sheraton Hotel in Algiers built by a Chinese construction company, whose workers are lodged in compounds which they can't leave and are fed garbage. They work in three shifts, 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week with no break and no vacation, and rotate in the bunk beds.
Ex 3/ Burj Dubai built with imported "en masse" Indian and Filipino workers who live in same conditions, and have passports removed so they can't go on strike and can be deported, and are typically not paid on time, while Dubai residents go skiing in their enclosed "Green" refrigirated ski run.
This is not "free movement of capital and labour". This is the cynical tactic of "divide to rule" to break the rights of workers everywhere by shipping in foreign workers "en masse" and creating "closed systems". This enables two birds to be killed with one stone: a) the imported workers are lost in a foreign environment, can't communicate locally on the job market, and are frightened to assert their rights as human beings, and b) this enables workers protected in the UK to be conveniently circumvented.
Such arrangements are typically outsourced so that the contracting company cannot be sued directly, in other words they evade the spirit of the law, in the name of so called "freedom of movement".
Were the Italian workers in this case individuals in the local labour market, this would constitute freedom of movement of labour. As they are sourced "en masse" by the subcontractor, this is a technique of exploiting cheap labour elsewhere and effectively sidelining the British workers. It is an effort to find the most disenfranchised and helpless workers and exploit them. It smells like the Atlantic Slave Trade.
It is not the British worker on strike who is racist. It is the company who is seeking the weakest and most disenfranchised worker to exploit him in alien surroundings who is racist, or perhaps a better word would be inhuman.
Doing so paradoxically renders the so called "consumers" necessary for stimulating economic activity so destabilised and unconfident that they can no longer be an efficient "consumer".
Those proponents of "free trade" are either so naive they believe in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus, or else they are cynical SOBs who don't care about people, which is the more likely possibility.
