BoE confirms what we knew already: migration driving down wages

Freakbro said:
That's a bit disingenuous (unsurprisingly) as the EU hardly enshrines the right for free movement to conduct illegal activity :rolleyes:
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It's free movement for everyone - decent people and criminals, you're not allowed to attempt to stop the criminals coming in, which is what would have happened previously.
 
scorza said:
It's free movement for everyone - decent people and criminals, you're not allowed to attempt to stop the criminals coming in, which is what would have happened previously.
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Not across Europe, criminals have always had free movement.....because, you know, being criminals they don't adhere to the laws that might have stopped them.
 
People working illegally is not the issue. That is criminal in the first place and should be dealt with by the law. It's people working for near minimum wage is the cause of downward pressures on wages.
 
I've still to see a foreign builder being chased by Dom in Cowboy builders.....

Fact is they work harder for less money and take less time off work.

No brainer why companies take on 1 romanian foreman who has good English and another 7 who don't speak a word but are great at plastering and brickwork.

This makes economic sense.

Now if you want to block of sectors of work for English only well you'll be going down a slipperly slope, and which trades do you block for how long etc?

Funny to see the same people on here bemoaning unions now complaining about this.
 
scorza said:
There's a huge problem across the whole of France right now with Roma gypsy pickpocket gangs, who as EU citizens cannot be stopped from operating there.
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Of course they can be stopped - they are criminals so can be arrested for committing crimes! Whether the French police are effective at doing so is a completely different argument.
 
jas72 said:
I've still to see a foreign builder being chased by Dom in Cowboy builders.....
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Ah well if Dom from Cowboy Builders says so...

[TW]Fox;28042379 said:
Of course they can be stopped - they are criminals so can be arrested for committing crimes! Whether the French police are effective at doing so is a completely different argument.
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Yes the police can arrest them and the country has an increase in crime. What I would say is that as well as the authorities being reactive, they should also be pro-active and stop these foreign gangs coming to the UK in the first place - we know who they are so why can't we stop them?
 
Efour said:
What is it with people blaming the immigrants and not the gang members and in this case Farmers????

They have no incentive to follow the law because they can exploit people?? I dont even see how one leads to the other.

They don't follow the law because they can make more profit - Cold hard capitalism in effect.

If they are morally inclined to break the law of the land then fine but don't blame the "immigrants"
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Ones a cause of the other, its a circular problem.
 
I mean when has there ever been market pressures that increase's wages. Maybe skilled work, but unskilled work. The wages dont increase because of a dearth of workers, I havent ever seen that.
 
scorza said:
Ah well if Dom from Cowboy Builders says so...



Yes the police can arrest them and the country has an increase in crime. What I would say is that as well as the authorities being reactive, they should also be pro-active and stop these foreign gangs coming to the UK in the first place - we know who they are so why can't we stop them?
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The EU gives much better inter-agency coordination and tracking capabilities so we are in a much better position to arrest criminals moving around Europe.
So we can stop them and are better at stopping them than before the EU but we obviously don't stop all of them in the exact same way we can't stop all criminals within Britain. Lack of resources, evidence, intelligence etc.
 
Calabi said:
I mean when has there ever been market pressures that increase's wages. Maybe skilled work, but unskilled work. The wages dont increase because of a dearth of workers, I havent ever seen that.
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Are you some kind of omnipresent god?

One example has happened around here. One of the supermarkets decided to raise the salary of the bottom earners from the state minimum of $7.30 an hour to $10.00 in the hopes that the staff would be more motivated, work better, improve customer interactions, reduce sick time , etc. It was so successful they increased min wage to $11.00. At the same time this triggered the other supermarkets in the regions to follow suit so now most of the, are paying $10-14 an hour for shelf stackers and till operators. There was a price war increasing minimum wages in order retain staff and increase quality.
There was certainly no lack of unskilled workers, quite an excess in fact.
 
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[TW]Fox;28042379 said:
Of course they can be stopped - they are criminals so can be arrested for committing crimes! Whether the French police are effective at doing so is a completely different argument.
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Pretty sure the French police gave up trying to after the riots in Paris a few years ago, some suburbs are basically lawless.
 
Freakbro said:
Do we though? When was the last time you rang up a supermarket and demanded cheaper products?

Competition between companies vying for our business drives down prices, but we don't 'demand' it - we just pay whatever price we are being charged on the shelf.

The problem with the Supermarket / Farmer relationship is just that Supermarkets have got to powerful and Farmers have little option but to sell their goods to them, giving the consumer (the Supermarket) the leverage in that situation to dictate the price rather than the Supplier.

When you see a BOGOF offer, it's run by the Supermarket but they make the Supplier pay for it, who has no choice.
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Consumers demand it by voting with their wallets - as seen by the huge rise in profits enjoyed by the likes of ALDI and LIDL and a drop in profits across pretty much all of the other chains.
 
D.P. said:
Are you some kind of omnipresent god?
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Actual LOL.

Anyway you're not really disagreeing with Calabi. I understood his/her post to mean there's never been a shortage of unskilled workers sufficient to raise their wages. So all this arguing that immigrants are depressing wages is nonsense - unskilled work would still be paid at minimum wage with or without them.

The fact that many immigrants are skilled makes this even more likely.
 
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StriderX said:
Pretty sure the French police gave up trying to after the riots in Paris a few years ago, some suburbs are basically lawless.
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French colleagues confirm this. What they've pointed out though are that they are areas inhabited by eastern Europeans, Asians and Africans.
 
joeyjojo said:
So all this arguing that immigrants are depressing wages is nonsense
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Or maybe your views are nonsense. There is no 100% correct view, because its a view. There are economists who disagree with each other.

Eg just yesterday...

"He noted that one respected study, by Dustmann, Frattini and Preston, found that each 1% increase in the share of migrants in the working age population leads to a 0.6% decline in the wages of the 5% lowest paid workers."

Its Pestons blog that was trying to unpick the seeming incompatabilities between the latest few BOE governers statements

"And to be clear, the general point that an influx of workers from abroad represents a weight on the pay of the indigenous population is a statement of the overwhelmingly obvious: it is simply a version of the law of supply and demand, that the price of anything falls when supply rises relative to demand.

So there is nothing terribly revelatory in Mark Carney saying, at the Bank's three-monthly news conference on its Inflation Report, that immigration had held down the rise in wages and living standards."

Link to full blog (and lets not forget Peston is pretty left wing leaning in general)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-32739852
 
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