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The British Are Coming for Your White-Collar Job
- float4 3y agohttps://archive.is/Lhkml https://archive.is/Lhkml
- causi 3y agoThe British Are Coming for Your White-Collar Job staff shortages in the U.S. You mean the white-collar jobs Americans can't find anyone to do?
- ergonaught 3y agoThat is pretty much the definition of staff shortage, yes.
- swores 3y agoI think that's their point, that if the jobs being taken by Brits are ones without anyone in the US able/willing to fill the position then the headline of "stealing jobs" is a bad one.
- Bluescreenbuddy 3y agoThis isn't an issue of someone not being able. It's an issue of anyone WILLING to do it for shit pay.
- explorer83 3y agoAs an American, I've heard way more stories about endless application for white collar jobs going nowhere than white collar jobs not being able to be filled (unless we are talking about something specialized and niche.). American companies have no problem selling out their own citizens for their shareholders.
- Bluescreenbuddy 3y agoThat's a load of horse manure and you know it. They can easily find people. The problem is they don't want to pay.
- Rinzler89 3y agoWould you mind also looking a bit further please, like on the main European continent? Our wages here are even lower than in London/UK and we also speak good English. You can hire a developer here for what you'd pay a barista at your San-Fran HQ. Thanks!
- oliwarner 3y ago> we also speak good English I think the accent has as much to do with it as anything. Americans are culturally wired to overestimate someone with even a mildly posh British accent.
- alephnerd 3y agoI've been a hiring manager, and while wages play a role, they do not significantly move the needle. The main driver is talent base, ease of operations, and time zone overlaps. The true value of offshoring comes from being able to essentially run 24/7 operations across a couple countries that have a strong talent base and relatively easy operations for us as a company (easy to fire, easy to hire, tax holidays, etc). This is why Israel, India, Ireland, and parts of Eastern Europe like Romania, Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine became popular for software outsourcing.
- Rinzler89 3y ago>This is why Israel, India, and parts of Eastern Europe like Romania, Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine became popular for software outsourcing. Not sure about the rest but it's definitely not easy to fire in Romania at all, and workers there get a lot of mandatory legal benefits like generous sick and parental leave. Unless you hire them B-2-B, which is quite common for high wage outsourcing jobs, then yeah.
- rob74 3y ago"hire B-2-B", a.k.a. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_self-employment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_self-employment ?
- callamdelaney 3y agoYes outsourcing to the UK where the average salary is ~$37,000 is I'm sure highly cost effective for US firms. Where we'd reach to say India for cheap labour the US now comes to us. I've seen US Interns get paid more than the vast majority of brits. Even the average dev salary is only say, double that average. Not even accounting for taxes - which supposedly cover healthcare but almost none you can readily access.
- Rinzler89 3y ago>Even the average dev salary is only say, double that average. Dev salary being double the average national salary is very good by western EU salaries. In Austria for example as a dev you earn just slightly above the national average income. I think only in the US and cheap countries like Poland, Romania, SE-Asia, etc it's normal for devs to earn several times the average national income because they're hot markets for tech outsourcing and average national wages are on the low side for those not working in tech making the gap really big, but in western Europe dev wages tend to be around national wages out side of big-tech.
- antonkochubey 3y agoDevs in my "cheap country like Poland" earn significantly above the national average income of Austria.
- alephnerd 3y agoKinda related, but why the heck are all third-party recruiters British? Every single third-party recruiting agency seems to be British
- Rinzler89 3y agoAlso from Ireland. I think English language being their main strength, versus in non-English speaking EU countries where recruiters tend to only look locally where their native language gets spoken instead of venturing into foreign countries where they don't know the language and culture very well. The other I think is how hungry and agresive the UK is for service sector opportunities, having always positioned it's economy as a middle-man. They have that US inspired go-getter mentality, that's lacking on the mainland.
- kranke155 3y agoIt’s because inequality is brutal in the island, while the mainland is a bit more equalitarian. So was the UK up until Thatcher really. She released the Kraken of capitalism, and now the UK feels like a small version of the US, inequality wise. Thatcher’s reforms increased GDP and wealth but also massively grew the number of working poor.
- dukeyukey 3y agoAlthough she also massively increased the wealth of the working class by opening up more property ownership. UK wealth inequality is amongst the lowest in Europe.
- darkclouds 3y ago[dead]
- kranke155 3y agoYou mean her political jiu jitsu of making council homes available for sale? Yes it created a new owner class that was enamoured with her, but the end consequence of it is probably the housing crisis/asset bubble that the UK has been living with for 15 years or so. Buying a council home did make a lot of new owners rich, but it's likely it harmed the long term prospects for the whole country. That was a lot of Thatcher. Deindustrialization annihilated the working middle class. In Germany industry was never destroyed for the sake of the service sector.
- seanhunter 3y agoAs someone who lives in the UK it's pretty depressing that we somehow seem to have succeeded in mismanaging ourselves into being a low-wage economy. The 20% or so depreciation in the pound as a result of brexit, and the subsequent futher devaluation as a result of the chaos of Boris -> Liz Truss -> Rishi Sunak definitely played a part in making the UK relatively attractive for firms from the US say, but there are also structural considerations such as years of real earnings decline and underinvestment in infrastructure, especially in the North of England, Wales and much of Scotland.
- stuaxo 3y agoIt's deliberate, if you read their document* from a few years ago "Britain Unchained" that was basically the plan. *I say document, it's written like it's by 6th formers who have just discovered Ayn Rand, but it is pretty short.
- ben_w 3y agoIn my head, a satire of a Brexit politician: "All those foreigners, coming here, taking our jobs; don't they know that's it's supposed to be us, going abroad, stealing their jobs?"
- seanhunter 3y agoYes and they come over here, steal our jobs and are simultaneously lazy and sponging off our welfare. They are Schrödinger’s immigrants
- KaiserPro 3y agoYou're assuming that it was a plan in reality it really wasn't the brexit vote went an unexpected way, and people had to actually figure out how to deliver the undeliverable policies that were promised. The problem being that the people doing the promising had never actually done anything of substance outside of talking bollocks for a living. The people doing the delivering _did_. However the probrexit side said "give me solutions not problems" followed by "no no, thats just propganda, you're the enemy of the people, I will find someone to put this moon on a stick" Thus we ended up with lord fucking frost. The anti brexit people wouldn't take anything less than full reversal meaning that we defaulted onto something utterly shite Now we are left with industrial quantities of diarrhoea smeared over everything, which is going to take years to clean up. The problem being that the next lot are promising not to use soap to clean up brexit. They are promising to shine it to a bright polish.
- jgbbrd 3y agoI'm an American software dev that has been in London for ~11 years now after working in Silicon Valley for years. The lower dev salaries are definitely a thing here. But I personally don't see much evidence of US jobs coming here to get filled on the cheap. Certainly not from A-list/exciting companies any way. Maybe it's a growing trend, but it's not something that many people here are taking note of.
- fmajid 3y agoSame here, work for a FAANG in London. They don't move more jobs to the UK despite the far lower wages because they don't want to deal with the complexities of managing across time zones.
- jonatron 3y agoAt my last job in London, jobs were being replaced by workers in cheaper countries such as Belarus, Ukraine, and India.
- mike_hearn 3y agoThere's quite a bit of slippy argumentation in this article. The anecdote about the filming of Barbie is misleading. The UK has been strongly competing with Hollywood for filming for years, as it's one of the few places in the world that has the local high-end moviemaking infrastructure to compete with Hollywood, but without the militant unions. This isn't a new phenomenon and the unions factor is mentioned near the end of the article, even though movies are presented as a new trend at the start. Then the article goes off on a big Brexit-related hit job. They say "Sterling has lost 15% of its value against the dollar since the 2016 Brexit referendum", "For the stagnating post-Brexit UK economy..." and "The pound’s sharp drop in value". For the real currency story see my other comment but briefly the currency had been in decline since 2014, but reached its pre-referendum value about 18 months after the vote when it became clear the promised 800,000 job losses and "emergency taxes" weren't going to happen. The actual leaving of the EU had little apparent effect either, with GBP/USD being the same now as in 2020. That makes sense because the UK economy is services-heavy and the EU single market only did anything for goods trading, not services. That's why the UK has always exported more services to the USA than the EU and why leaving didn't actually impact UK/EU trade despite what the article claims. There's a Parliamentary report that shows a graph of long term UK/EU trade (in slow decline due to the falling size of the EU relative to rest of the world) and you can't actually see Brexit on it at all, because the effect was too temporary to show up. The WSJ also tries to blame inflation on Brexit but again, a quick check of the real charts shows that this isn't the case: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/inflation-cpi https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/inflation-cpi Inflation wandered around between the 0%-2% band that the central bank was targeting up until the economically disastrous lockdowns and associated money printing to pay for things like furlough and eat-out-to-help-out (which the US wisely did not copy). The GFC had a much bigger impact on inflation than Brexit.
- dukeyukey 3y ago100% agree. I'm deeply anti-Brexit, but out of all the EU countries, we were probably the best places to make a go at it. We export mostly services, speak the global lingua-franca (lingua-anglo?), have a great geographic position, and unlike almost every other EU country, our biggest trading partner is not in Europe.
- peggywatson17 3y ago[dead]
- AndrewEllwine 3y ago[dead]
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoWorks where archive.is is blocked: https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=3118053273395&w=mX8eXvPdcgG0GHbfPfIi0GSrWE6xRwYL https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=3118053273395&w=mX8eXvPdcg...
- andrew4151 3y ago[dead]