Large increase in migrant workers.

Personally I blame the EU.

I work with a lot of nurseries (flowers) and they are nearly all manned by polish. There is no job 'snobbery' from what I see, just the lack of advertisement to locals for jobs. Also there is almost a discrimination against employing a brit, as they are more likely to not be pushed around in the workplace ie lots of overtime, lack of breaks etc.

Standing up for employment rights is not 'snobbery' I might add, it's the law of the land and it should be adhered to.

Also many eastern European truck drivers, who are willing to work for less than minimum wage and not stick to laws on driving hours, force out the good honest folk.
 
Basher said:
Interesting point. Do you think sending them all home would be better or worse for the economy?
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It would lower the 'value' of it as you put it, as after all, less people = less GDP. But it would be a better economy because it would be doing one of the things it is actually supposed to do - and one of them is to provide jobs for British people.

Bringing out that vague 'adding value to our economy' is almost as cringeworthy these days as when donuts on TV start talking about 'getting back to growth'. In short, it means nothing.

And I didn't say 'send them all home'. Immigration should be heavily restricted to actual extremely highly skilled workers, even to the point where I would offer tax incentives for specialised scientists and engineers to come here.

Everyone else = Access Denied.
 
jumpy said:
Now I'm not sure of the veracity of what I'm going to recount next, I heard it on radio 4 some months back, so bear with me. Regarding immigrant workers - eastern european mainly. It was said that they get child benefit, whilst working here, for children living back in poland, for example. Also that if they are working here for six months or less, they get a rebate for all the tax/national insurance they have paid here when they go home and are free to repeat the process of working for six months, sending money back home, returning home etc etc. For some reason that does not sit well with me. :confused:
I know my english mate, who is married to a polish girl, gets FA from the polish state in terms of support. Things seem to be different when it's the other way around though.
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You have to think to yourself this:

If you lived in Edinburgh where the minimum wage you earn is £6, but you could move to Cornwall and earn £20 an hour for picking corn or cleaning, what would you do? You'd move there and send money back to Edinburgh. You probably wouldn't care about working or living conditions because you are earning 3x what you earnt back home.

Now apply that across national borders along with all the extra problems associated with that, as well as times the number of people by 10 or 20 and that is essentially what we have with the UK and Eastern Europe.
 
Sonea Fifer said:
snip
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That's the thing though, I'm not averse to economic migration. I'd prefer if it were more a case of 'come here for residency and to work' as opposed to working for a bit and sending money home. There's a longer term aspect to economic migration that would benefit the UK far greater than this short term model that we seem to have now. Particularly when you look at other countries and their reaction to foreign nationals being denied 'state help' in their countries. I've seen plenty of eastern european mums with kids at my local jobcentre, signing on. I know you'd not get this as a brit in poland.

I'm not sure what the answer is - I suspect it is one that is not overly radical in either direction, however. Not so much a free for all, or http://youtu.be/G07szNm_5Jk either :D

The flip side to this was shown in a bbc article from a while back (I can't find the story, so I'll paraphrase) Basically a guy had come to the UK to do a degree in engineering or something, had moved here with his wife and two kids. Completed his degree and started work. Because there's a rule stipulating that his bank account had to have a certain level of money in it at all times (to weigh against the possibility of this guy becoming dependent on state benefits) - this is checked by the UK border agency - his account went below this threshold by some paltry sum and the poor bloke was threatened with being deported back to wherever. To my reckoning this is completely wrong. It all ended ok, but the fact that he was called into question in the first place when he was doing his best and working after achieving his qualification here and contributing to the economy, most likely with a view to possible citizenship, boggles the mind. :confused:

GAC said:
well the agency first said "you will work somewhere 12 weeks then have a few weeks off" but then they read the documents again and worked out that wouldnt work, so suggested they would probably rotate staff to "give you more experience in different places".

companies will eat it up and we will all be used and abused even more, cant win either way now.
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hehe, sure, you'll have a lot of 'experience' of different jobs, but I was asked in an interview a while back: "You seem to have had quite a few different jobs, not really settled down much in one place. Would you say that this is because, although you're 35, you've not really found something you'll want to stick at?" :eek:
Quite simply there's only been temp jobs available. No, I didn't get the job :D


Namesake said:
You have to think to yourself this:

If you lived in Edinburgh where the minimum wage you earn is £6, but you could move to Cornwall and earn £20 an hour for picking corn or cleaning, what would you do? You'd move there and send money back to Edinburgh. You probably wouldn't care about working or living conditions because you are earning 3x what you earnt back home.

Now apply that across national borders along with all the extra problems associated with that, as well as times the number of people by 10 or 20 and that is essentially what we have with the UK and Eastern Europe.
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Yer, I see that. It also tallies with what I heard in an interview on R4 (again) a ways back: in response to the 'problem' of economic migration into the UK and how british citizens might not like this, the answer was - "well, it's a europe wide free market now, if you want to have work, you've got to go where the jobs are..." which is a pretty soulless answer if you ask me, especially coming from a civil servant, iirc.
 
Brookert said:
Personally I blame the EU.

I work with a lot of nurseries (flowers) and they are nearly all manned by polish. There is no job 'snobbery' from what I see, just the lack of advertisement to locals for jobs. Also there is almost a discrimination against employing a brit, as they are more likely to not be pushed around in the workplace ie lots of overtime, lack of breaks etc.

Standing up for employment rights is not 'snobbery' I might add, it's the law of the land and it should be adhered to.

Also many eastern European truck drivers, who are willing to work for less than minimum wage and not stick to laws on driving hours, force out the good honest folk.
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I have been reading this thread with intrest and this post struck an accord with me. About 11 years ago I moved to the west country from London and got a job in the warehouse, it was a big culture shock once I had started the job. The job was shift work (12hrs) with working weeks varying from 48hrs to 80 hour weeks depending on the shift.

This was okay as the time off matched the working week, what shocked me was 'compulsory' overtime, you had to stay till the job was done, the least thing you wanted after a 12hr day is to stay on an do some more! An example of this would be my last weekend in the job where I worked a 22hr day and was then expected back in for the next shift a few hours later. I took my legal 11hrs offsite but this was always frowned upon and I was always the only person to do it.

Anyway, I stayed in this job for 5 years and every single day was horrible but I stuck it out. The treatment of staff was bad, you was merely a number and your opionion counted for nothing, if you spoke up the message was "if you don't like it, there is the door". I used to try and speak up all the time but with little backup from my colleagues, they hated the treatment but just accepted it as they didn't want to 'rock the boat'.

It's been 5 or so years since I left the job but I still keep in contact with many people who work there. Nothing has improved, in many respects they have gotten worse. They have not recieved a pay rise in many years and the last one they did get was meager, they have also lost bonuses they would get and any other small benefits that was given. When this is tallied up the pay now is actually less then when I started over 11 years ago.

Coincidently the work force has gone from being 100% local to 80% foreign in under 8 years.

Thats the problem, many people had issues with their working conditions. If an organisation maintained this stance eventually they would struggle to employ people to work there and things might eventually improve. The mass influx of general workers from EU has not only prevented these impovements from happening but in many cases they have exacerbated the problems because organisations feel more confident when needing to employ.
 
regulus said:
Tired excuse from the natives and in MOST cases, not true at all.
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BS tbh

Over the past year >75% of new jobs created have gone to non-uk born. It's not simply minimum wage earners who have been replaced but individuals at a variety of levels above and beyond that. Simply put, they can get foreign workers at a lower cost per unit 'skill' due to the ability of these workers to cost arbitrage when returning to their home nations. UK workers cannot compete on this basis and are priced out.

Here's one VI ******** test you can apply - if it were a skill issue we'd expect high numbers of immigrant workers from places like germany, sweden, netherlands, etc. Nations which are known for having highly skilled workforces. But then there is about bugger all evidence of this - i.e. it's ********.

Thus the ******** reasons the VIs spout is just to hide that they are deliberately choosing cheaper labour, and an attempt to con the people into believing otherwise.

The point on unskilled 'jobs brits won't do' jobs really is it's not a two way street. Migrant youths aren't harder working then British youths (whatever their colour). A Brit can't go over to Bulgaria, earn three times what they could in the UK, come back and buy a house outright. The Bulgarian is here just for a few years to leech as much money as possible, of course he's going to work 15 hour shifts non-stop. He's going to take as much as he can at triple time for the duration. That's the reality.

Companies (and you) don't give a ****, they will go for the cheaper option every time.

Ultimately if a "lazy" Brit could go out to Eastern Europe and come back a few years later to buy a house outright he would probably be on the first plane out tomorrow. But he can't and so the great global wage arbitrage continues, unabated.
 
gothic_hobbit said:
This is 100% correct unfortunately :(
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The statistics are a little off though, as this also counts British citizens who were born abroad. As an arbitrary example, back at University I was counted as a non-UK (EU) student simply because I had lived in France for more than 4 years before going to University; in the statistics I was lumped into the "non-British" category due to this. This was in spite of having a British passport, being born in the UK and having two British parents :p

Don't the other countries have to open up to the Eastern immigrants? I thought most of the other EU countries took out a temporary delay on the influx of immigrants from the "new" countries, and that it was supposed to end in 2011 at some point.
 
I don't blame a lot of people not wanting to work for slave labor minimum wage, you'll be living the same off JSA so why work?

Big business is so greedy they just keep cutting wages while prices go up. However migrant workers are basically.... well slaves. Suits them down to the ground.
 
Seasonal agricultural workers would account for large increase in migrant labour in summer. The farm I work on has 300 people in December and 2000 in June.
 
Brookert said:
Personally I blame the EU.

I work with a lot of nurseries (flowers) and they are nearly all manned by polish. There is no job 'snobbery' from what I see, just the lack of advertisement to locals for jobs. Also there is almost a discrimination against employing a brit, as they are more likely to not be pushed around in the workplace ie lots of overtime, lack of breaks etc.

Standing up for employment rights is not 'snobbery' I might add, it's the law of the land and it should be adhered to.

Also many eastern European truck drivers, who are willing to work for less than minimum wage and not stick to laws on driving hours, force out the good honest folk.
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We advertise at all job centres near our farms and do not get more than 10 applications a year, with one or two bothering to even turn up for interviews.

As for breaking minimum wage, driving laws etc. it would be hard for any large agricultural business to do anymore. We have 4-5 audits a year from supermarkets checking on wages, welfare etc. The majority of our workers are educated so there is very little chance of us pushing them around. They know their rights (normally have quite a few workers studying to be lawyers)
 
you should see my house mate, he is the epitome of what is wrong with this country - lazy hand out dependant **** hole tbh.

Edit: I should clarify he's anglo saxon native born to a well off family who seem to support him in his life failings.
 
I don't see what the fuss is. Nothing is stopping those who can't get a job in the UK migrating to the anywhere else in the EU.

If we got rid of all immigrants the nation would most likely either grind to a halt due to no-one to do the work they do, or there would be many companies going bust, because they'd have to increase their wages to attract british workers to do the jobs that immigrants were happy doing for cheap.

Bare in mind that most immigrants are just here for a few years, to save enough to buy a house/ setup a business / get married etc.. back home. Which is another reason why they are happy doing the grunt work, as its not permanent.

I know a fair few Eastern Europeans all highly skilled.
 
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Namesake said:
It would lower the 'value' of it as you put it, as after all, less people = less GDP. But it would be a better economy because it would be doing one of the things it is actually supposed to do - and one of them is to provide jobs for British people.

Bringing out that vague 'adding value to our economy' is almost as cringeworthy these days as when donuts on TV start talking about 'getting back to growth'. In short, it means nothing.

And I didn't say 'send them all home'. Immigration should be heavily restricted to actual extremely highly skilled workers, even to the point where I would offer tax incentives for specialised scientists and engineers to come here.

Everyone else = Access Denied.
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So you think people should only ever be allowed to live in the country they were born in (through no choice of their own)?

This would obviously work two ways, meaning if you ever wanted to leave the UK= Access Denied.
 
sp1ke said:
I don't blame a lot of people not wanting to work for slave labor minimum wage, you'll be living the same off JSA so why work?

Big business is so greedy they just keep cutting wages while prices go up. However migrant workers are basically.... well slaves. Suits them down to the ground.
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Well, I'll bet you love all the cheap crap that the shops can sell you, right?
 
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