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Why have eastern europeans do the work instead of the normal workers? It's not like eastern europeans have any special resistance to corona, nor are their live
by catalogia 7y ago
Why have eastern europeans do the work instead of the normal workers? It's not like eastern europeans have any special resistance to corona, nor are their lives worth less.
- soperj 7y agoYep, they wanted brexit, now live with it.
- rad_gruchalski 7y agoExcept, it is the same in Germany and France.
- noemotion 7y agoI guess Eastern Europeans were the normal workers until now.
- catalogia 7y agoOh, well if that's the status quo that makes sense. I assumed the normal workers were unavailable due to quarantine/etc.
- saiya-jin 7y agoNo, the 'normal' workers (you mean I guess local) were unwilling to do the work for so little, while intensively supporting this situation by their shopping habits.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- catalogia 7y agoI mean whoever was doing the work last year. My comments in this thread have had some pretty wild score swings, I guess I stepped on a live rail. I'm not familiar with British agriculture politics.. I was thinking only of companies temporarily replacing a sick workforce with another (who would presumably themselves then become sick.) My comments were not intended to be commentary on British immigration, which I have no reason to care about.
- Daishiman 7y agoThe cost of picking fruit such that it being affordable is not coherent with the cost of living of Britain. Such is the case in a lot of places in the first world. You can keep having affordable fresh fruit, or you can pretend you can pay laborers local prices, driving up the price dramatically, reducing the total size of the market (because nobody's going to be able to afford the new prices), and having even less produce being made, further driving up costs as economies of scale become less effective.
- ALittleLight 7y agoPeople should pay more for fruit and food if more money is required to fairly compensate laborers. The solution shouldn't be importing a disadvantaged population to exploit for cheap labor. If our modern economy is so weak we cannot afford fruits and vegetables we should confront and overcome that weakness rather than conceal it by importing an underclass.
- burntoutfire 7y agoInterestingly, it's a shift-by-one kind of situation. I.e. while British or German crops are picked by Poles, Polish crops are picked by Ukrainians... It seems that agriculture everywhere relies on underpaid migrant labor. I wonder if even Ukraine imports some migrant labor for this purpose.
- Barrin92 7y agonobody has to do the work, the work is voluntary. Eastern Europeans do the work because the wages are still higher than in Eastern Europe, so it makes financial sense for them to move to the UK. In contrast to the exploitation narrative this is actually mutually beneficial. The food is produced at low cost which is good for consumers (in particular poor ones who would otherwise not have access to expensive vegetables), and the workers who earn higher wages than they otherwise would have.
- dsparkman 7y agoTime to get the "they're stealing our jobs" crowd out in the fields picking.
- stevenwoo 7y agoThis farm labour shortage would have happened in the UK no matter what - once Brexit had been finished if the UK followed through on the immigration promises they made to restrict inflows from EU. Don't know how representative it was but most of the "stealing our jobs" crowd was people who don't work from a sampling of interviews they showed on the BBC.
- collyw 7y agoMaybe the "stealing out jobs crowd" are the ones competing for the lower wage jobs. I got the impression that Brexit voters were often towards the lower and of the earning spectrum. While I am for staying in the EU myself I can see why these people don't feel like they get much out of EU membership.
- gnusci 7y agoLow cheap food chain in general is sustained by cheap labor worldwide. Now that borders are closed the chain is in part disrupted, so it doesn't work.