The Brexit aftermath thread

[Dizzeeyooo]

i'm not going to lie, it's a point I sort of agree with, in that bringing in skilled workers is not the problem, but rather unskilled workers.

yep, all those unskilled workers doing jobs that British people are absolutely desperate to do (lol - "A worker at Hall Hunter Partnership's Tuesley Farm in Godalming, Surrey, told Today it had had one English applicant in the last several years, but that they quit after one day"), all those unskilled workers that cannot claim jobseeker's allowance for 3 months after they arrive and can be removed from the UK after 6 months if they have not managed to find a job (successive UK Governments have chosen not to enforce this)

unskilled workers stealing our jobs while also claiming jobseeker benefits and remaining in our country against our wishes forever are clearly a hugeeeeeee and uncontrollable problem in the UK, woo Brexit

[Deleted]

yep, all those unskilled workers doing jobs that British people are absolutely desperate to do (lol - "A worker at Hall Hunter Partnership's Tuesley Farm in Godalming, Surrey, told Today it had had one English applicant in the last several years, but that they quit after one day"), all those unskilled workers that cannot claim jobseeker's allowance for 3 months after they arrive and can be removed from the UK after 6 months if they have not managed to find a job (successive UK Governments have chosen not to enforce this)

unskilled workers stealing our jobs while also claiming jobseeker benefits and remaining in our country against our wishes forever are clearly a hugeeeeeee and uncontrollable problem in the UK, woo Brexit

Do you know why no British person goes for those jobs? Because they pay peanuts.

Remove the unskilled workers coming in from abroad who will work for nothing, and then wages have to increase on the jobs that no one will take.

The whole "they're taking our jobs" issue isn't just a one sided problem.

[Pann]

Do you know why no British person goes for those jobs? Because they pay peanuts.

Remove the unskilled workers coming in from abroad who will work for nothing, and then wages have to increase on the jobs that no one will take.

The whole "they're taking our jobs" issue isn't just a one sided problem.

Legally the farm cannot pay below the National Minimum Wage therefore whole immigrant workers working for nothing argument does not stand up to scrutiny.

[Mormolyce]

Do you know why no British person goes for those jobs? Because they pay peanuts.

Remove the unskilled workers coming in from abroad who will work for nothing, and then wages have to increase on the jobs that no one will take.

The whole "they're taking our jobs" issue isn't just a one sided problem.

There are other factors at play; farms tend to be in, you know, rural areas for example. In a lot of cases people who grew up in the cities and suburbs aren't keen to move out to the country where they'd be a long way from friends and family and out of the environment they're used to. Meanwhile an immigrant with no attachment to living in any particular area is freer to move around.

This is particularly the case when the work is highly seasonal.

So even though you have an unemployed population, it's no guarantee you can fill those jobs domestically.

[Kiri]

If those allowances are withdrawn when you fail to show up at a job you've been matched to, you will fill those jobs eventually. I feel there is a moral evil in someone who is chronically unemployed yet refuses jobs because they are out of their comfort zone. I can understand holding out for a few months for something better but after 6months of unemployment you should just grab whatever you can get.

To be frank though, can be a wealth of a difference between 'out of one's comfort zone' and 'being forced to move far away'.
Take, for example, someone who is chronically unemployed and living in London. A farm in a rural area is not a place you can simply commute to, so that is out of the question. Half of Britain's low-income households do not own a car either. Buying a car just to work a minimum wage job far away is simply not feasible in that scenario.
That leaves only the option of having to move entirely. Since keeping and maintaining a place in London and at the rural area is similarly too expensive at that wage, the person in question now has to sell their old place and move to the new one, having to move at their own expense. By that point, the government basically forces someone to relocate and uproot their life just to work a minimum wage job.

This gets even worse if the job in question is seasonal, as most farm work is. These are not exactly careers you can build your life on either, but once you live in that rural area, finding a job back in London will be nigh impossible, as the person still does not have a car and no longer a residence in London. An immigrant that just comes over to the UK for the season just goes back home when there is currently no work. What does the UK citizen, now living in some rural area, do during the winter?

This problem is exacerbated if the person in question has family. Should the government be allowed to break up families to enforce what you stipulate? An unemployed person being married to one working a low-paying job in a big city is not exactly unheard of. Forcing one of those to move out into a rural area does not only split up a family, but might also force the spouse to find a new place to live in since their job can no longer sustain the old one.

Of course, there are a lot of variables. I do agree that within reason, the government should be able to tell chronically unemployed people to take available jobs, like, in this example, within London. But you replied specifically to someone speaking about seasonal work in rural areas and how people living in urban areas could not or would not take take those jobs, I put the focus on that. There is no moral evil in someone refusing to be uprooted in order to take a seasonal job that might not even be there anymore the next year. The only evil would be in a government forcing that upon people, just to say they brought down unemployment.

[Pann]

I am not denying this. The question is what should happen if the unemployment is chronic. If you cannot find work for an extended period of time then the expectation is that you need to change your life. That's exactly what the immigrants do after all; they cannot find work back home so they are willing to travel all the way to the UK to work there, even if it is seasonal.

Unskilled migrants have been able to travel the UK to find work because the traditionally the GBP has been much stronger than Euro and the cost of living in their own countries is much lower. As the gaps narrow the less financially viable it becomes to travel abroad to find work and we are already seeing that EU migrants are less willing to come the UK for work due to the falling GBP.

[Kiri]

I am not denying this. The question is what should happen if the unemployment is chronic. If you cannot find work for an extended period of time then the expectation is that you need to change your life. That's exactly what the immigrants do after all; they cannot find work back home so they are willing to travel all the way to the UK to work there, even if it is seasonal.

If I had an easy cure for chronic unemployment, I wouldn't be posting it on MMO champion, but tell every politician I could find tbh. Changing your life, yes, that can be an expectation - but it has to be a sustainable change. Seasonal work is, by definition, not sustainable. Immigrants can do it more easily due to the differences in living costs at home compared to even minimum wage. Otherwise, they would not be doing it either.

[Noradin]

The cure for chronic unemployment is not unknown. It's called retraining. The issue is being able to offer quality retraining and having people who are actually willing to undergo retraining. If the UK could e.g. subsidize nursing training for the unemployed, they'd find work fast and government would make back the cost of the subsidy by not having to pay allowances and taxing a medium income worker fairly fast.

And that would decouple the problem of domestic unemployment from immigrants taking seasonal jobs, so what all this comes back to: This was a failure of the British government that had nothing to do with the EU. EU immigrants causing unemployment of British workers is misconception, because existing arrangements with the EU are already in place on the EU's side to solve this problem.

[Kiri]

The cure for chronic unemployment is not unknown. It's called retraining. The issue is being able to offer quality retraining and having people who are actually willing to undergo retraining. If the UK could e.g. subsidize nursing training for the unemployed, they'd find work fast and government would make back the cost of the subsidy by not having to pay allowances and taxing a medium income worker fairly fast.

To a certain extent, yes. However, that is fairly unpopular, as seen in the US, and costs a lot of money, so politicians are reluctant to do so. Especially when chronically unemployed people are considered 'lazy' by the general populace, it is hard to justify giving them training, even without knowing that a lot will refuse either way.

[Slant]

Oh I never felt it was the EU's problem. Such unemployment issues can be solved (by cutting down on corporate profit margins ofc) by enforcing the minimum wage. The main issue by far remains classification (by accounting standards contracted workers that for all intents and purposes serve the same function of employees SHOULD be classified as employees, the state should enforce this by law and thus such workers should be paid at the very least the minimum wage and have protections like employees) and illegal employment.

Minimum wage isn't the be all end all cure to everything. It has limits and negative side effects. It essentially puts the Government into a position where they have to babysit the market. Now, Germany is a big fan of babysitting the market, but there are things that go too far. And in an age where companies are always looking to automate processes, it can also cost jobs, because suddenly you can quantify precisely just how much more or less profit a certain type of automation is.

[Mormolyce]

If those allowances are withdrawn when you fail to show up at a job you've been matched to, you will fill those jobs eventually. I feel there is a moral evil in someone who is chronically unemployed yet refuses jobs because they are out of their comfort zone. I can understand holding out for a few months for something better but after 6months of unemployment you should just grab whatever you can get.

I mean you can object to it until you're blue in the face but it's a reality of the workforce.

Also there are degrees of unemployment, I don't think it's really as simple as people think it is.

[Noradin]

Oh I never felt it was the EU's problem. Such unemployment issues can be solved (by cutting down on corporate profit margins ofc) by enforcing the minimum wage. The main issue by far remains classification (by accounting standards contracted workers that for all intents and purposes serve the same function of employees SHOULD be classified as employees, the state should enforce this by law and thus such workers should be paid at the very least the minimum wage and have protections like employees) and illegal employment.

The main problem might be that there are readily accepted scapegoats available to those who took responsibility to address these problems, and that using those scapegoats is a better and easier bet than actually working on the solution. Unfortunately, scapegoats are a very resilient and prolific population and everyone seems to love taking them in, so I doubt politicians will run out any time soon. The EU can be used for a few more decades and before those are up whole generations of new scapegoats will be brought up and ready to serve for everything and anything.

- - - Updated - - -

Minimum wage isn't the be all end all cure to everything. It has limits and negative side effects. It essentially puts the Government into a position where they have to babysit the market. Now, Germany is a big fan of babysitting the market, but there are things that go too far. And in an age where companies are always looking to automate processes, it can also cost jobs, because suddenly you can quantify precisely just how much more or less profit a certain type of automation is.

And the counter to that is to tax automation (via taxing creation of value) which only works if you have enough wealthy population (costumers) to force companies to play by your rules--you need to be of a size with the EU, not France, Germany, or the UK. If you are too small companies will simply "produce" elsewhere and rely on individual customers circumventing your laws so the company does not have to play by them.

[Noradin]

We have taxation of Creation of Value. It's called VAT.

Yes, but probably not on a level to offset the cost difference between automation and paying wages in the future.
So if we want to retain a wealthy population and our systems of values we need to form institutions big enough to dictate terms (laws) to companies.
With the size companies reach today and will reach in future European nation states won't cut it on their own, so we better find a way to work past our relatively minor differences and all change a bit or we will be made to change a lot and won't even get to control anything about it. Right now Europe has enough wealthy citizens to set the stage and lay down some ground rules, but we must act now, not in a few decades when someone else might have established rules we do not like.

[Huehuecoyotl]

Minimum wage isn't the be all end all cure to everything. It has limits and negative side effects. It essentially puts the Government into a position where they have to babysit the market. Now, Germany is a big fan of babysitting the market, but there are things that go too far. And in an age where companies are always looking to automate processes, it can also cost jobs, because suddenly you can quantify precisely just how much more or less profit a certain type of automation is.

If you don't have a minimum wage, then the government still needs to "babysit" the market. Because it needs to provide benefits for people that are actually working, because without that they wouldn't have enough to live on. Introducing the minimum wage is saying to the free market that they can't get away with paying people so little that they can't even exist on it and expecting society to bridge the gap. If your business is viable, it should be able to pay enough for people to live on. If it can't, it isn't viable. And in a true free market, that should mean that it doesn't exist.

[Nigel Tufnel]

If you don't have a minimum wage, then the government still needs to "babysit" the market. Because it needs to provide benefits for people that are actually working, because without that they wouldn't have enough to live on. Introducing the minimum wage is saying to the free market that they can't get away with paying people so little that they can't even exist on it and expecting society to bridge the gap. If your business is viable, it should be able to pay enough for people to live on. If it can't, it isn't viable. And in a true free market, that should mean that it doesn't exist.

Yes, but you're a communist and nothing that you have to say can be taken seriously. So...

[Slant]

If you don't have a minimum wage, then the government still needs to "babysit" the market. Because it needs to provide benefits for people that are actually working, because without that they wouldn't have enough to live on. Introducing the minimum wage is saying to the free market that they can't get away with paying people so little that they can't even exist on it and expecting society to bridge the gap. If your business is viable, it should be able to pay enough for people to live on. If it can't, it isn't viable. And in a true free market, that should mean that it doesn't exist.

That's nonsense. Germany has lived rather well for most of it's modern existence without minimum wage. If it wasn't necessary for 70 years, why the sudden urge to introduce minimum wage for the past few years? Because sure as heck, nobody cared about it until some dude from the left wing brought it up. And we see the result in the US already. Wasn't it a McDonald's that decided to try automation to replace workers because suddenly a bot was cheaper than a minimum wage dude?

Mark my words, minimum wage doesn't create jobs, it destroys them. The best you can say is that it improves existing jobs. Again, at the cost of jobs overall.

Especially in Germany, you'll find that many companies will simply go for 400 Euro minijobs to replace fulltime jobs. That means less benefits for workers (that is, basically none).

[Lochton]

Any updates on this Brexshit? Last I heard, they've just been fucking around.

[Masark]

Wasn't it a McDonald's that decided to try automation to replace workers because suddenly a bot was cheaper than a minimum wage dude?

https://www.snopes.com/media/notnews/robotmcdonalds.asp

[Dizzeeyooo]

Any updates on this Brexshit? Last I heard, they've just been fucking around.

UK still expecting to have their cake and eat it, EU still patiently trying to explain how the world actually works

[Shadowmelded]

Ohey, looks like the Irish border is still a thing. Thought that was "sorted".