butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Have a closer look. And then work out when east-european immigration dropped off.
Massive rises in unemployment: Do we need to talk about Eva?
- Thread starter treelover
- Start date
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
SpineyNorman
Inappropriate content removed
starfish2000
Well-Known Member
i work in the rail industry lots of our agency staff are eastern europeans, lovely people and on such shit wages they all do 70 hour weeks in order to earn a living wage. one of my friends hasn't seen her daughter back in romania for months and sometimes she rings her up and she has to go off and cry....lovely social cost this global village.
it is exploitation and its too drive wages and ts and cs down anyone who says it isnt is either a liar or horribly fucking naive
it is exploitation and its too drive wages and ts and cs down anyone who says it isnt is either a liar or horribly fucking naive
sihhi
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered
No one says that migration has no effect. Of course it's downward as experienced in many jobs.
But migration is ultimately a result of capital driving
A. privatisation (dispossessing accumulation) or B. enclosure and theft of the commons.
A. in Eastern Europe B. in the Sahel Region - the two main sources of immigration into Western Europe. Latin America has a bit of both.
We're over here because they're still over there.
But the question is how to respond to it. It's similar to complaints of women entering the workforce. The arguments against women are close to arguments in favour of more 'segmented' work permits ('no immigration' as it would likely manifest itself) or deportation (the ultimate far-right aim).
On the left, women were thought to be
a. more interested in working for a short while just making money.
b. had better eye-hand control, smaller limbs and hence by their very nature they allowed bosses to discriminate against men in the clerk work/printing fields.
c. impossible to organise in trade unions.
d. self-segregating, talking to each other not to men, hence divisive.
(The right thought women incapable of productive work/against God's order of things etc.)
Similar stuff was said of the Irish on the mainland aswell; because they lived in country places back home and most of their young died early only the hardy tough ones remained, bosses always chose them for jobs at the expense of the English.
What's clear is that immigration doesn't increase international solidarity, the British mainland labour movement in the middle of struggle for its own claims 1919-1921 () couldn't organise itself together (minus the honourable exceptions) to stop army and naval transport to Ireland, whereas the labour movement against intervention in Russia was very strong.
What's also clear is that restricted immigration does not magic 'growth' or 'jobs' either, look at every real life case of restricted immigration - Japan and South Korea are cited for some reason (but the DPRK is left out):
random search for lost generation from business website:
Because jobs are not about migration, they're about the ratio/balance of capital to labour, and capital right now is in the driving seat. It's a meaningless issue like - 'balanced budgets', less testing in schools, sound money, unlimited immigration, reforming a Gold Standard (the anarcho-capitalists' best idea yet) putting positive role models in adverts for young people, scrapping the Euro, a North American Free Trade Zone including Britain and Ireland, having teachers penalise students more thoroughly for spelling mistakes, proportional representation, more works' councils, the gold standard, a Commonwealth trading block, a return to the Imperial Tariffs for whoever wants to play.
None of these things will bring jobs, nor will restricted immigration. The dangers of restricted immigration are the further heightening of backlash nationalism in the countries that have their immigration restricted.
Look at what happened to Japan - pre-ww1 - colonialist power. Post ww1 Australia, New Zealand, America institute further exclusion criteria in their immigration laws - this targets Japanese in particular result - nationalism and hypercolonialism.
Powers of exclusion used in America and Australia against visiting communists/barred from entry/deported to due to part of family not being native. Currently rich British people are able to come and go and live freely in most of the world - they've managed to buy up 80.000 houses in Southern Turkey, they are taking over Carribbean islands aswell apparently. If we target Eva, these (often absentee) landlords. Trevor Nelson (who condemned the August riots called for people to be sent down) has a house with a pool in the Caribbean he uses to make himself rich by letting it out. Should we start a campaign to restrict Trevor Nelson's entry into Britain? Should he be turned back at Heathrow when he returns from his holidays?
SpineyNorman
Inappropriate content removed
Good post, agree with it all, but you seem to have misunderstood mine - I wasn't arguing for restrictions on immigration, in fact I gave a couple of reasons why that wasn't the answer and even if it was shown to have a positive short term impact on wages I'd be uncomfortable with it. I just dislike the fact that some on the left (and we've all come across them, the kind of lefty liberals you see a lot of at UAF demos) want to wish the issue away and claim economic immigration either has a positive effect on work prospects or no effect at all - they might not be on this thread but there's plenty of them out there, and when they say this, which contradicts what people know from their own experience to be true, it discredits everything else they say.
The only thing I can see that could help would be to unionise migrant workers - which is, of course, easier said than done.
SpineyNorman
Inappropriate content removed
Me? So you don't think a massive pool of cheap labour (and easily exploited - very hard to unionise and often unaware of their rights for a variety of reasons including often poor English language skills) will have any effect on the wages of unskilled workers in particular? Supply and demand innit.
Can you please explain to me how this could possibly do anything other than reduce the earning potential of low skilled workers? Because frankly I'm at a loss.
Well, for a start I'm not sure I recognise your description of "cheap and easily exploited labour", that doesn't tally with my own personal experience of the people from Eastern Europe who I have worked with. Yes, the job market in (say) Poland is worse than here, but once you factor in the effort required to migrate I'm not sure that is such a major factor.
I think a big part of it is that there is demand in this country. I don't know if I agree that those jobs would be filled by British workers, and would be better paid and conditions if there wasn't immigration from Eastern Europe. I suspect that, just as companies complain that school leavers in this country don't have a good enough basic education literacy etc for some jobs, employers would be complaining they couldn't fill those jobs.
People from accession states are limited as to what benefits they can claim, clearly jobs such as working in a hotel or whatever are preferable to having no money, but they might not be preferable to being on benefits (I've worked in a shop and in catering, it's hard and tiring and by and large pretty thankless). I think it's a big jump to say that wages and conditions would be better to entice British workers into these jobs.
I think a big part of it is that there is demand in this country. I don't know if I agree that those jobs would be filled by British workers, and would be better paid and conditions if there wasn't immigration from Eastern Europe. I suspect that, just as companies complain that school leavers in this country don't have a good enough basic education literacy etc for some jobs, employers would be complaining they couldn't fill those jobs.
People from accession states are limited as to what benefits they can claim, clearly jobs such as working in a hotel or whatever are preferable to having no money, but they might not be preferable to being on benefits (I've worked in a shop and in catering, it's hard and tiring and by and large pretty thankless). I think it's a big jump to say that wages and conditions would be better to entice British workers into these jobs.
SpineyNorman
Inappropriate content removed
If those workers weren't available these employers would just say "oh, well we can't fill the jobs so we'll shut up shop!"? They don't offer crap wages because they need to do so to break even - they offer them because they can.
And I've worked in packing sheds and factory lines where there are Polish workers who most definitely were easily exploited. I've seen it with my own eyes.
This is what I was talking about re: people denying it's even an issue. Doesn't do your credibility any good whatsoever, especially when the people you're talking to, like me, know this to be true from their own personal experience. The answer is to point out that bolting the door shut simply isn't an option, it would be a disaster, and we've already discussed some of the reasons for this on this very thread. Go at it from that angle and you can win people over. Sticking your fingers in your ears and pretending it's not happening does nobody any favours, including the migrant workers.
And I've worked in packing sheds and factory lines where there are Polish workers who most definitely were easily exploited. I've seen it with my own eyes.
This is what I was talking about re: people denying it's even an issue. Doesn't do your credibility any good whatsoever, especially when the people you're talking to, like me, know this to be true from their own personal experience. The answer is to point out that bolting the door shut simply isn't an option, it would be a disaster, and we've already discussed some of the reasons for this on this very thread. Go at it from that angle and you can win people over. Sticking your fingers in your ears and pretending it's not happening does nobody any favours, including the migrant workers.
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
There are different approaches here though - personally I'm aware that there are issues of exploitation of certain groups of people (often language- and immigration-status-based and definitely not restricted to people from Eastern Europe) but it doesn't have to be seen within the sort of ethnic division context that the OP here promotes at all.
SpineyNorman
Inappropriate content removed
I agree, that's why I criticised the "Eva" reference in the OP. I think we do need to discuss this though, mainly because I honestly don't know what the answer is - unionisation is an obvious one but very difficult, what else is there? It's a very tricky subject and one that I think the left as a whole has yet to address in any meaningful way.
I'm not denying that workplace conditions and pay are an issue, I'm not denying that they may be more of an issue for people from Eastern Europe, they tend to work in industries where these issues are more prevelant, they are maybe sometimes more vulnerable. I'm questioning the causal link drawn between open borders and poor conditions and pay.
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
No, I think I probably agree with you generally - I get annoyed by the repetition of the "immigration is good for the economy" thing, as if that were the important part to consider and not taken straight from MPs' speeches. It needs addressing on proper internationalist terms, bypassing both bosses' propaganda and nationalist exclusionism.
SpineyNorman
Inappropriate content removed
What part of it are you questioning precisely? If there's people willing to do jobs for lower pay, who are also willing to take a lot more shit from their bosses, how on earth could this not impact on pay and working conditions? I once did some maintenance at a packing shed that employed mostly Polish workers. The employer took around two third of their minimum wage salary to "pay for their accommodation" (and bearing in mind they were working up to six 12 hour shifts a week that's not a small sum) which consisted of a mattress in a shared dormitory. How can this not impact on pay and working conditions? If someone who's willing to tolerate this is available to take the job then they won't employ someone who isn't. It's really that simple. And if they couldn't exploit people like that they would be forced to pay a more reasonable rate. I'm finding it very hard to understand what you're getting at here.
I'm questioning the simple supply and demand model that you're relying on. I'm a bit tired so I can't really articulate it any better than that. A quick look at wiki and a memory of an economics book I once read tells me it's not completely leftfield to be sceptical about it.
I'm just watching Food, Inc (very good incidentally) and they said, when the mechanism of farming leads to a problem, they don't say, oh, we won't do that and go back to the old way, they develop some high tech fix. Likewise, if they couldn't pay low wages to Eastern European workers, I doubt they'd say, oh well, we'd better pay people properly and treat them well. They'd just find another group to screw and another way of screwing them.
SpineyNorman
Inappropriate content removed
A couple of things. First of all what you're saying here could be (and indeed has been) used as an argument against agitating for better pay and conditions generally - "you'll price yourselves out of the market". The logical conclusion of what you're saying is, essentially, that we should accept shite pay and conditions because if we don't we'll all be replaced by machinery. I'm not arguing that ending immigration will result in the betterment of employment prospects for low waged workers in Britain (as I've said, repeatedly, on this thread). These employers will want to keep their increased profit margin, of course they will. But the foreign "reserve army of labour" is one of the tools capital and its friends in government have employed in order to erode both pay and conditions. It's far from the only one but it's certainly there. And the EHRC agree with me.
Secondly, in some of these jobs automation simply isn't an option with current technology. In others the costs make it prohibitive. Take the example of the packing shed I gave above. The only piece of technology that could replace most of those workers would be a robot (conveyors etc won't do it). But I happen to know that, at least at the place we worked, the cost of a robot, which would replace only one worker, was the equivalent of about 15 years wages for the worker it would have replaced (and I know this because they asked my boss to cost it for them). And when you bear in mind the fact that 1) if anything's even slightly out of place the more basic and affordable robots make a right mess 2) workers can perform additional tasks, relating to quality control, that a robot can't do and 3) workers are flexible, they can be used to complete a wide variety of tasks - they machines cannot. Now that's just for the one example I gave and that I know about - there will be similar problems with technological solutions in many of these cases. Only in the cases where technological fixes are both more expensive than migrant labour and less expensive than home grown labour will the scenario you describe come into play. That's a fairly small margin you've got to play with there and one in which very few of the kinds of fixes you describe can fit.
I didn't mean a technological fix literally, I meant it as an analogy. Just as in food does the over-technologisation lead to problems and these are solved with more technology, so the race to the bottom in the jobs market leads to problems which are not solved with better practice but rather other bad practice actions.
I don't think that what I'm saying is an argument against agitating for better pay and conditions, but it is an argument against keeping (say) eastern european workers out of the UK jobs market. Personally I think the solution is education - educate employers that it's not ok to treat workers like that, educate consumers how companies treat their workers, and educate employees that they can ask for better. That and legislation I guess.
Incidentally I'm a bit sceptical about that Guardian article that has been linked to a few times. It says "it concludes that there is evidence that "the recent migration may have reduced wages slightly at the bottom end of the labour market, especially for certain groups of vulnerable workers". and "It suggests if the trend continues it "runs the risk of perpetuating the existence of substantial numbers of temporary jobs with unsociable hours that are increasingly only attractive to migrant workers"." neither of which are particularly cut and dried arguments. There's a lot of "may" and "runs the risk". I'd be quite interested to see that report and to look at the hard evidence which they present.
While I don't think that you intend to or really are being racist it does worry me that this issue of immigration vs low wages is somehow set up as if it's proven that workers from Eastern Europe have contributed to unemployment or whatever and I really doubt that this is proven and I do think it verges on racism.
I don't think that what I'm saying is an argument against agitating for better pay and conditions, but it is an argument against keeping (say) eastern european workers out of the UK jobs market. Personally I think the solution is education - educate employers that it's not ok to treat workers like that, educate consumers how companies treat their workers, and educate employees that they can ask for better. That and legislation I guess.
Incidentally I'm a bit sceptical about that Guardian article that has been linked to a few times. It says "it concludes that there is evidence that "the recent migration may have reduced wages slightly at the bottom end of the labour market, especially for certain groups of vulnerable workers". and "It suggests if the trend continues it "runs the risk of perpetuating the existence of substantial numbers of temporary jobs with unsociable hours that are increasingly only attractive to migrant workers"." neither of which are particularly cut and dried arguments. There's a lot of "may" and "runs the risk". I'd be quite interested to see that report and to look at the hard evidence which they present.
While I don't think that you intend to or really are being racist it does worry me that this issue of immigration vs low wages is somehow set up as if it's proven that workers from Eastern Europe have contributed to unemployment or whatever and I really doubt that this is proven and I do think it verges on racism.
SpineyNorman
Inappropriate content removed
Fuck off. This is exactly what I was talking about. Once you get beyond the hand wringing you're essentially saying I'm a racist but just don't realise it. Any idea how fucking offensive that is? Try telling that to someone in the real world and you'll be picking your teeth up off the floor.
Your argument, if taken to its logical conclusion, is an argument against striving for better pay and conditions - just think for a second ffs. You're saying that if bosses couldn't get the cheap labour they'd use non-labour (but not technological - fuck knows what that means) fixes and the jobs would be lost. Either this applies across the jobs market or it doesn't. Doesn't matter whether it's that they're unable to bring in cheap migrant labour or workers striking or whatever for better pay - the effect is the same - bosses would have to pay more for the labour. You're saying that if they can't have it at rock bottom rates they'll cut the jobs completely. It therefore follows that it's counterproductive to strive for better pay since they'd find a magic way to get the work done without workers.
Of course the arguments in the report are probabilistic rather than set in stone - without an alternative reality with no migration to compare with you can't do much better.
I shouldn't have to say this again, I've repeated it several times already, but I don't want to restrict immigration. What I do want is an honest debate about this stuff, so that we can actually come up with a better solution than "let's send bosses on training courses to teach them that exploitation's bad".
The bit about "educating employers about how to treat their workers" is fucking la la land. They don't treat workers like shit because they're unenlightened. They do it because it's profitable. The state won't help because it's their state.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
What about increasing the minimum wage, and then enforcing it properly.
That seems more realistically achievable than unionisation.
And how do we convince the government to increase the minimum wage?
Fuchs66
Ring a ding
Cant comment on the situation in the UK but this does not reflect the situation during the time I was working in an eg packing plant in Germany. The people with an immigrant background were the ones who really stood up for their rights as opposed to the German workers who just put up with the crap.
SpineyNorman
Inappropriate content removed
It's you who doesn't understand what you're saying, not me. I'm hearing you loud and clear. You seem to think that because I think migrant labour has put downwards pressure on pay and conditions then I must want that to be the case. I don't, far from it. But that's the way it is.
And don't you dare accuse me of racism you despicable cunt - you don't seem to realise just how offensive that is. I've been an active antiracist for over 20 years. One of the main reasons I think we need to discuss this is because if we don't, and we don't come up with a progressive, internationalist solution then racists will exploit the issue. Cheap migrant labour is what it is - it's migrant labour that happens to be cheap. The most disgusting thing about all this is the fact that I'm supposedly a racist for opposing the exploitation of migrant workers and you, who claim it's a good thing, are a lovely fluffy antiracist. People like you push people into the hands of the far right.
@sihhi - do you see what I was talking about now, with the way some on the left want to wish this away and to claim that anyone who questions their line is a racist? We have a classic example of that here.
SpineyNorman
Inappropriate content removed
You just accused me of being a racist and now you're going off in a strop because I've called you nasty names? Get a grip ffs.
Look, I'm sorry for that and I'm sorry that I offended you. I think this issue of racism if probably a red herring to be honest. We disagree about facts at the end of the day.
To make a point about racism, I don't think it makes sense to divide up the world into people who are racist and people who aren't racist. Racism is pretty insidious and I would acknowledge that sometimes I have racist thoughts, attitudes or behaviours as do most people probably. I would have thought that 20 years of being an active antiracist would have made you well aware of that. But that's a red herring and I'm sorry I offended you.
To make a point about racism, I don't think it makes sense to divide up the world into people who are racist and people who aren't racist. Racism is pretty insidious and I would acknowledge that sometimes I have racist thoughts, attitudes or behaviours as do most people probably. I would have thought that 20 years of being an active antiracist would have made you well aware of that. But that's a red herring and I'm sorry I offended you.
Similar threads
