Britain’s failed experiment in boosting low-wage sectors
economist.com
economist.com
I suspect it wasn't cached state or plugins, because I tried to clear those to no avail. My bank then informed me it didn't like my Firefox version (despite being relatively recent).
UK NHS healthcare workers who have come from the EU and APAC are telling me in person that they intend to stop coming to the UK because of 1) poor NHS resources such as funding and hiring, 2) new UK Home Office visa difficulties having friends and relatives visit, 3) new UK problems for in-home caregivers, especially involving transport e.g. how to take the patient to a doctor, pharmacy, or hospital.
These are serious life-threatening problems. The #1 action item in my opinion is for the UK Home Office to offer fast-track visas for caregivers and medical helpers.
From my American coastal perspective, $11/hr sounds ridiculously low here and I know for a fact that most childcare workers are paid considerably more than that here. I have relatives who work under the table doing childcare so they don’t even have any minimum wage/labor protections and they still make more than that. I don’t perceive the cost of living in the UK as particularly less so I am confused how this can be justified.
e: I see now that you are talking about elder care but I feel like the rates would not be so dissimilar.
This is how badly the UK needed doctors, before they decided to close the doors to immigration, thinking people like my friend were stealing jobs to more deserving British radiologists.
And how much Britain needed medical help to go recruit abroad. I do not think German nor US companies are sitting outside Italian universities to entice young talent.
IIRC he was earning around £4000 a month, which is unheard of in Italy at the start of one's medical career.
Medical labor in the US is far too organized to let providers do anything remotely resembling this. It is not due to lack of need, hiring foreign doctors is politically impossible in the US due to regulatory capture.
For full time 37.5 hours a week 52 weeks a year that's only 28% above minimum wage.
Median weekly wages in the UK are £663, or £34,500 a year. It's depressing that "skilled labour" isn't even the median wage. Throw in the likelihood that most arrivals will be in cities which tend to have higher media
Of course the problem in the UK is that all productive gains go to land owners, so what's the point.
It was a lie by David Cameron to appease the idiot group of conservative voters that thought Europe was the cause of all ills. A lie that blew up on his face, because he didn't (nor Johnson & co.) expect it to win. And a lie that blew in the British voters' face when it turned out that exiting Europe was a very stupid idea that would not have solved the problem of being a country still in toxic and unresolved love with its imperialistic, classist past.
The day Britain stops believing their are at the top of the most powerful empire in the world, but simply a rich island off the coast of a very powerful trading bloc, they might make something of their position.
The economic way out for Britain requires a lot of humility and taking a serious look at the sort of people that are running this country. Thinking that EU scum are coming here to steal your jobs is certainly not the way to go about it.
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Bonus: Here's Boris Johnson, champion of Vote Leave, after the referendum: https://youtu.be/nbdOsMeVrLw?si=UyVv2_j1M6QcavtC — quite the somber demeanor for someone who has just won a massive gamble.
It was utterly clueless to expect such big changes to happen overnight.
This goes for Brexit in general. It will take decades for things to shake out and the world will be changing all the while.
But now, any company that did hire domestic workers was left holding the bag and the government created a moral hazard setup on subsidizing being unresponsive to immigration policy changes.
It is not only the Polish or Italian immigrants like me that compose low wage immigration; in fact, non-EU immigration is higher than ever.
And I'm not even touching the fact that immigration is a great economic boost, but tends to be misconstrued as a negative to avoid by politicians, as if migrants come and sit on their arses living on benefits.
Not for long
https://news.sky.com/story/britains-economic-trajectory-will...
With many languages there isn't a general public. For news it's way more interesting to have sound items in the native language than translation and some concepts, some way people grew up won't transalte at all.
And then life situation between Germany and Romania varies a lot. There are only very few, if at all, problems shared a politician could campaign on.
It was pretty much the same plan that has worked for 3 centuries in many countries, especially in the UK.
Unfortunately, everyone in government (and more so the civil service) is too bourgeois to care about basic things like "do we have enough electricity" or "why has private investment in the agricultural sector been so poor since 1997?".
The only way this economy works is by importing cheap labour. We have an entire farming industry that relies on foreign workers with low standards of living. How on earth is it sustainable?
I can't think of a single country where they have the labor they need, certainly not high-skilled but low-skilled is a problem too. Mostly the problem is pay, or to put it another way, you cannot make enough money of low-skilled labor to pay decent wages, which results in no available labor.
Something needs to give. Either we need a housing crash serious enough that historic city centers see across the board drops in rent, or we need serious tax cuts.
And that points out another problem: people have the idea that they have seriously lost quality of life in the past 10 years. I think they're right in most respects, from housing to medical care to pensions, but of course it's more nuanced than just that. People want a big change in politics everywhere, it's just that that mostly means different things in different countries (although extreme-right is profiting everywhere). I'm kind of afraid of extreme-right getting an outright majority in a big European country in the next set of elections.
Wherever this goes, it doesn't seem like it's much a Brexit problem.
Maybe the elephant in the room is that we can't function or have our modern comforts without an exploited underclass. We have slaves to this day, as the Romans did, they just go by another name.
The cost to produce goes up.
Well, UK inflation is higher than average, so maybe there's your answer.
If there are no underclasses in the world then surely the vast majority of problems relating to wealth inequality have been solved -- why worry about such a far fetched positive situation?