5 ms·

Britain’s failed experiment in boosting low-wage sectors

41 points by hhs 3y ago

chrisjj 3y ago
https://archive.ph/sOws0 https://archive.ph/sOws0
- Nowado 3y ago
  Gives me captcha loop : (
  - echelon 3y ago
    Update your browser. I recently got stuck in that with a slightly old version of Firefox. After updating, everything worked again. 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).
    - jetrink 3y ago
      I have the most recent version (116.0.3) and I'm also seeing a loop. This includes trying the site without plugins.
  - dang 3y ago
    We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37274783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37274783.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sph 3y ago
There was never a plan for Brexit to boost low-wage sectors. 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. -- Bonus: Here's Boris Johnson, champion of Vote Leave, after the referendum: https://youtu.be/nbdOsMeVrLw?si=UyVv2_j1M6QcavtC https://youtu.be/nbdOsMeVrLw?si=UyVv2_j1M6QcavtC — quite the somber demeanor for someone who has just won a massive gamble.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  Well the theory of ending low wage immigration was never tested. As the Economist article notes, low wage immigration is up.
  - mnd999 3y ago
    It’s up because it didn’t work. The investment never happened so the harvest rotted in the fields and Christmas dinner was going to be cancelled so the government quietly reversed course. It was utterly clueless to expect such big changes to happen overnight.
    - nonethewiser 3y ago
      Its not something that will resolve within 1 or 2 years. This goes for Brexit in general. It will take decades for things to shake out and the world will be changing all the while.
    - whimsicalism 3y ago
      If businesses had confidence in the government to not reverse course, they might have done something. 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.
      - mnd999 3y ago
        That’s pretty moot. Business would never have confidence because it was pretty obviously a dumb plan.
  - sph 3y ago
    There is a number of Brexit voters that voted yes to "keep the paki out". 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.
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
I just don't understand how a country can rely on, or why it should rely on, a steady influx of some cheap-labor underclass. It just doesn't seem sustainable. Just seems like a huge red flag, that you can't function without some exploited underclass. It creates a lot of misaligned incentives. What happens when the underclasses of the world stop being underclasses? What will you do then? 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.
- LightBug1 3y ago
  >> What happens when the underclasses of the world stop being underclasses? The cost to produce goes up. Well, UK inflation is higher than average, so maybe there's your answer.
- s_dev 3y ago
  >What happens when the underclasses of the world stop being underclasses? What will you do then? 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?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ta1243 3y ago
"fewer than one in seven arrivals last year were skilled workers (officially defined as those paid over £26,200" 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.
ricardobeat 3y ago
That picture of workers lined up, boxes in hand, waiting to load the truck surely makes the case for efficiency.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jph 3y ago
I'm highly involved in the UK startup sector, especially for open source software that can help the UK NHS, patients, and caregivers. In the UK, caregivers earn about £9 per hour, and to the best of my knowledge caregivers are the #1 shortage of low-wage sector jobs. 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.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  It seems like paying more than $11/hr would help reduce the labor shortage you are facing. 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.
  - sethhochberg 3y ago
    As a benchmark: CDPAP, a Medicare-funded program in the US that lets people be employed as caregivers for family, pays $18-20 an hour in much of the northeast.
    - whimsicalism 3y ago
      Yes, I think the range I would expect would be roughly $15-$25
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
Philip-J-Fry 3y ago
The UK economy is a pyramid scheme. There's no focus on building expertise and keeping it here. There's no investment in up and coming industries. There's practically no long term plan. We went through 10+ years of low interest rates where we could have invested all over the country and instead we just cut and cut and cut. Now we go through a period of high interest rates and the country falls apart. 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?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- candiodari 3y ago
  But this is a problem all over Europe. You could say it's worse in Italy than it is in the Netherlands, but even in the Netherlands politics are on a serious collision course with reality. 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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

41 points by hhs 3y ago

chrisjj 3y ago

https://archive.ph/sOws0 https://archive.ph/sOws0

Nowado 3y ago
Gives me captcha loop : (
- echelon 3y ago
  Update your browser. I recently got stuck in that with a slightly old version of Firefox. After updating, everything worked again. 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).
  - jetrink 3y ago
    I have the most recent version (116.0.3) and I'm also seeing a loop. This includes trying the site without plugins.
- dang 3y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37274783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37274783.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

sph 3y ago

There was never a plan for Brexit to boost low-wage sectors. 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. -- Bonus: Here's Boris Johnson, champion of Vote Leave, after the referendum: https://youtu.be/nbdOsMeVrLw?si=UyVv2_j1M6QcavtC https://youtu.be/nbdOsMeVrLw?si=UyVv2_j1M6QcavtC — quite the somber demeanor for someone who has just won a massive gamble.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nonethewiser 3y ago
Well the theory of ending low wage immigration was never tested. As the Economist article notes, low wage immigration is up.
- mnd999 3y ago
  It’s up because it didn’t work. The investment never happened so the harvest rotted in the fields and Christmas dinner was going to be cancelled so the government quietly reversed course. It was utterly clueless to expect such big changes to happen overnight.
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    Its not something that will resolve within 1 or 2 years. This goes for Brexit in general. It will take decades for things to shake out and the world will be changing all the while.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    If businesses had confidence in the government to not reverse course, they might have done something. 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.
    - mnd999 3y ago
      That’s pretty moot. Business would never have confidence because it was pretty obviously a dumb plan.
- sph 3y ago
  There is a number of Brexit voters that voted yes to "keep the paki out". 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.

VoodooJuJu 3y ago

I just don't understand how a country can rely on, or why it should rely on, a steady influx of some cheap-labor underclass. It just doesn't seem sustainable. Just seems like a huge red flag, that you can't function without some exploited underclass. It creates a lot of misaligned incentives. What happens when the underclasses of the world stop being underclasses? What will you do then? 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.

LightBug1 3y ago
>> What happens when the underclasses of the world stop being underclasses? The cost to produce goes up. Well, UK inflation is higher than average, so maybe there's your answer.
s_dev 3y ago
>What happens when the underclasses of the world stop being underclasses? What will you do then? 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?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

ta1243 3y ago

"fewer than one in seven arrivals last year were skilled workers (officially defined as those paid over £26,200" 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.

ricardobeat 3y ago

That picture of workers lined up, boxes in hand, waiting to load the truck surely makes the case for efficiency.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

jph 3y ago

I'm highly involved in the UK startup sector, especially for open source software that can help the UK NHS, patients, and caregivers. In the UK, caregivers earn about £9 per hour, and to the best of my knowledge caregivers are the #1 shortage of low-wage sector jobs. 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.

whimsicalism 3y ago
It seems like paying more than $11/hr would help reduce the labor shortage you are facing. 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.
- sethhochberg 3y ago
  As a benchmark: CDPAP, a Medicare-funded program in the US that lets people be employed as caregivers for family, pays $18-20 an hour in much of the northeast.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    Yes, I think the range I would expect would be roughly $15-$25
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

Philip-J-Fry 3y ago

The UK economy is a pyramid scheme. There's no focus on building expertise and keeping it here. There's no investment in up and coming industries. There's practically no long term plan. We went through 10+ years of low interest rates where we could have invested all over the country and instead we just cut and cut and cut. Now we go through a period of high interest rates and the country falls apart. 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?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
candiodari 3y ago
But this is a problem all over Europe. You could say it's worse in Italy than it is in the Netherlands, but even in the Netherlands politics are on a serious collision course with reality. 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.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]