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Number Of Romanians And Bulgarians Working In Uk Jumps By Over 25% In Three Months


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HOLA441

Oh, come on, don't be silly, of course it does, that's the whole point of it.

I could give you a thousand examples from my own everyday experience, but what's the point? If you can't already see what's been going on around you for the last ten years, then why would you listen to me?

You're falling for the old lump of labour fallacy again - the idea that there are a certain, fixed number of jobs to be filled in a country. If this were the case, the USA would have 99.9% unemployment! The fact is, each immigrant taking a job in the UK also generates other jobs, though those jobs will likely be in different sectors to the one he's working in.

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HOLA442

You're falling for the old lump of labour fallacy again - the idea that there are a certain, fixed number of jobs to be filled in a country. If this were the case, the USA would have 99.9% unemployment! The fact is, each immigrant taking a job in the UK also generates other jobs, though those jobs will likely be in different sectors countries to the one he's working in.

FTFY ;)

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HOLA443

You're falling for the old lump of labour fallacy again - the idea that there are a certain, fixed number of jobs to be filled in a country. If this were the case, the USA would have 99.9% unemployment! The fact is, each immigrant taking a job in the UK also generates other jobs, though those jobs will likely be in different sectors to the one he's working in.

How much of that money being earned is leaving the country?, how much benefits is being given to immigrant workers to sustain a uk living?, how many people in general need housing benefits (approx 5 million I think), how much are the big farmers gaining from cheap labour (with workforce living in caravans on/near site and having money deducted from wages. Plus healthcare/translation issues at times in hospitals.

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HOLA444

You're falling for the old lump of labour fallacy again - the idea that there are a certain, fixed number of jobs to be filled in a country. If this were the case, the USA would have 99.9% unemployment! The fact is, each immigrant taking a job in the UK also generates other jobs, though those jobs will likely be in different sectors to the one he's working in.

You're falling for the Lump of Labour Fallacy Fallacy again. Just imagine the job that would have been taken by an immigrant, was taken by an unemployed indiginous person instead. Less would be paid out in benefits, tax revenue goes up, the worker's wage gets spent in the local economy, a community now has one more productive member with which to build. If an immigrant takes the job? None of this happens (apart from the tax bit).

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HOLA445

You're falling for the old lump of labour fallacy again

Labour is not fully fungible in the way it would need to be for that theory to be meaningfull. The effect upon an individual of the immigration varies depending upon their circumstances. Lets look at a few examples;

I'm an accountant, so what is the effect on me of the mass immigration of relatively lower skilled labour? The number of people competing for those jobs has gone up, so wage costs go down. Goods and services get cheaper for me. All in all I do quite well out of it. Good for me!

My parents do even better. They're retired boomers who hold significant capital. They no longer provide any labour into the econony, so an influx of people of working age has the double benefit of lowering the costs of goods and services to them and supporting the value of their capital investments. Double good for them!

How about a plumber? The influx of the much spoken of polish plumber was great for the 'economy' (if you look at the economy from the point of view of myself or my parents), the cost of plumbing services to us fell. It didn't work out as well from the point of view of the native plumbers who suddenly find that they can't charge as much for their services. So is it double plus good for them, or can you admit they're worse off?

Do you genuinely think the economy is better from their point of view? Overall the increase in the wealth of everybody else may make up for the fall in an individual plumbers wealth, but that wouldn't make me feel much better, and I don't expect it to make him feel any better about it either.

What do you do for a living, and would you support a targeted government campaign to bring in hundreds of thousands of people of the same profession with the deliberate aim of driving down wages in your sector?

Bear in mind that while you as an individual would be royally ******ed over, the overall economy would be better because of the lower costs of goods and services to others, and the increased (or maintained) capital values for all the holders of capital.

Edited by SpectrumFX
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HOLA446

Just out of curiosity, do you think that East European countries also have a non-hardworking element, like we have here in Britain?

They do but they aren't the ones that are going to get on the plane and leave their family to go work where the minimum wage law helps them more than the natives.

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HOLA447
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HOLA448

This thread is about Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants not a handful of Romanian gypsies in Hyde Park.

I never stated that I wanted unlimited immigration. I simply stated that most of those coming were likely to be working.

That's the whole point though, if you're in the EU you've potentially got unlimited immigration.

And these people that will be working, where are they all going to live? Will extra homes be provided for them (and hospitals for that matter)?

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HOLA449

Labour is not fully fungible in the way it would need to be for that theory to be meaningfull. The effect upon an individual of the immigration varies depending upon their circumstances. Lets look at a few examples;

I'm an accountant, so what is the effect on me of the mass immigration of relatively lower skilled labour? The number of people competing for those jobs has gone up, so wage costs go down. Goods and services get cheaper for me. All in all I do quite well out of it. Good for me!

My parents do even better. They're retired boomers who hold significant capital. They no longer provide any labour into the econony, so an influx of people of working age has the double benefit of lowering the costs of goods and services to them and supporting the value of their capital investments. Double good for them!

How about a plumber? The influx of the much spoken of polish plumber was great for the 'economy' (if you look at the economy from the point of view of myself or my parents), the cost of plumbing services to us fell. It didn't work out as well from the point of view of the native plumbers who suddenly find that they can't charge as much for their services. So is it double plus good for them, or can you admit they're worse off?

Do you genuinely think the economy is better from their point of view? Overall the increase in the wealth of everybody else may make up for the fall in an individual plumbers wealth, but that wouldn't make me feel much better, and I don't expect it to make him feel any better about it either.

What do you do for a living, and would you support a targeted government campaign to bring in hundreds of thousands of people of the same profession with the deliberate aim of driving down wages in your sector?

Bear in mind that while you as an individual would be royally ******ed over, the overall economy would be better because of the lower costs of goods and services to others, and the increased (or maintained) capital values for all the holders of capital.

+1

Thing is from just a monetary point of view it "appears" to balance so that for every winner there is a loser due to immigration, but that's not really the case.

For example consider the U.K workers that have been displaced. We all know that cheap labour immigration has blocked up the entry level positions in the job market. Normally those jobs would be filled by youngsters who would use it as a stepping stone. Instead, for multiple years now they have sat on the dole or lived with their parents doing absolutely nothing, effectively a lost generation with respect to being productive members of our economy.

Now what happens when cheap labour immigration ends as at some point it inevitably will?

Will that lost generation suddenly enter the employment market to take up the slack?

The answer is obviously that they will not, we will still have a lost generation of unemployable and unemployed individuals acting as a huge economic drag. This is the reality of the future we have to look forward to once cheap labour immigration ends. A much much higher level of base unemployment baked into the cake. We've already seen the folly of this, from what happened to the ex-miners and industrial workers of much of the north. So why on earth are we doing it again?

Snowflux and his ilk can't see the wood for the trees.......

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HOLA4410

You're falling for the Lump of Labour Fallacy Fallacy again. Just imagine the job that would have been taken by an immigrant, was taken by an unemployed indiginous person instead. Less would be paid out in benefits, tax revenue goes up, the worker's wage gets spent in the local economy, a community now has one more productive member with which to build. If an immigrant takes the job? None of this happens (apart from the tax bit).

He has fallen for the Lump of Labour fallacy indeed, because if such a thing existed, the economy would actually be growing and tax revenues rising faster than expenditure. The plain fact it is, this isn't happening. Indeed we are gradually impoverishing ourselves.

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HOLA4411
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HOLA4412

Believed it or not I do not read the mail, otherwise I would be obsessed with gypsies like Harry Monk.

Unfortunately the work ethic is lower amongst our youth than immigrants. A plumber I know told me how hard it is to get Brits to start in the trade, many who object to getting their clothes dirty. The East Europeans just get down to it and turn up on time.

Admittedly my earlier comment that aroused shots from both sides was probably an overreaction to Harry Monk's rather unpleasant post. Plenty of Brits are hardworking, but there is an element that isn't and money alone will not change behaviour.

Load of nonsense to be honest. Let me tell you a story from my time living in the states.

Two or so decades ago a vested interest group that wanted a cheap and plentiful supply of workers to staff university research labs, published a report on how in just a few short years there would be a large shortage of scientists coming out of the system. With the end result being american companies starved of key knowledge workers.

A campaign was started in the press, and seeing a chance to import cheap labour american companies jumped onto the band wagon. The U.S administration panicked and opened the american university system to unlimited numbers of Ph'D level workers (postdocs), with the implied promise that if they came to the U.S they would eventually be able to stay long term and work in the private sector.

Of course that crashed the conditions of U.S citizen postdocs, and caused pay and conditions in the private sector to fall/stagnate. Short term contracts started to predominate (this ring a bell at all?), and suddenly the dire predictions came true!!! There was a shortage of U.S. citizens wanting to be scientists.

Apparently, or so everyone was told, america's twenty-somethings (the most capable and able of) either didn't have the right aptitude or simply did not want to put the effort in to become scientists because it was "too hard" (it would have stretched the boundaries of credulity to call them lazy so the VI's opted for second best), and that this was the reason for the fall in numbers.

The rest is history.

Now try and damn well tell me this is not exactly what has been done, and what you are saying about U.K. youth

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HOLA4413

Unfortunately the work ethic is lower amongst our youth than immigrants. A plumber I know told me how hard it is to get Brits to start in the trade, many who object to getting their clothes dirty. The East Europeans just get down to it and turn up on time.

Go to any London branch of Selco, the builders merchant, when it opens in the morning. You'll see twenty or thirty people hanging around the car park entrance, dressed in the giveaway adidas tracksuit trousers.

Wind your car window down and shout "I need a plumber, £30!" and prepare to be stampeded. That's why your friend likes them, not because of any superior work ethic, and as somebody who has spent many years living and working in central and Eastern Europe, I can tell you that the Polish work ethic is similar to ours at best and the Romanian/Bulgarian work ethic considerably weaker than that.

If you want lower house prices then the last thing you should be supporting is yet more demand for housing.

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HOLA4414

Load of nonsense to be honest. Let me tell you a story from my time living in the states.

Two or so decades ago a vested interest group that wanted a cheap and plentiful supply of workers to staff university research labs, published a report on how in just a few short years there would be a large shortage of scientists coming out of the system. With the end result being american companies starved of key knowledge workers.

A campaign was started in the press, and seeing a chance to import cheap labour american companies jumped onto the band wagon. The U.S administration panicked and opened the american university system to unlimited numbers of Ph'D level workers (postdocs), with the implied promise that if they came to the U.S they would eventually be able to stay long term and work in the private sector.

Of course that crashed the conditions of U.S citizen postdocs, and caused pay and conditions in the private sector to fall/stagnate. Short term contracts started to predominate (this ring a bell at all?), and suddenly the dire predictions came true!!! There was a shortage of U.S. citizens wanting to be scientists.

Apparently, or so everyone was told, america's twenty-somethings (the most capable and able of) either didn't have the right aptitude or simply did not want to put the effort in to become scientists because it was "too hard" (it would have stretched the boundaries of credulity to call them lazy so the VI's opted for second best), and that this was the reason for the fall in numbers.

The rest is history.

Now try and damn well tell me this is not exactly what has been done, and what you are saying about U.K. youth

Yes, it really is a disgusting slur to start calling people lazy when they are simply making rational decisions based on the situation as they find it.

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HOLA4415

Go to any London branch of Selco, the builders merchant, when it opens in the morning. You'll see twenty or thirty people hanging around the car park entrance, dressed in the giveaway adidas tracksuit trousers.

Wind your car window down and shout "I need a plumber, £30!" and prepare to be stampeded. That's why your friend likes them, not because of any superior work ethic, and as somebody who has spent many years living and working in central and Eastern Europe, I can tell you that the Polish work ethic is similar to ours at best and the Romanian/Bulgarian work ethic considerably weaker than that.

If you want lower house prices then the last thing you should be supporting is yet more demand for housing.

You're wasting your breath Harry. There's a hardcore group of people who still think that Eastern Europeans are in the UK working 12 hour shifts out of some altruistic work-ethic, when the real reason is of course because they can earn 4-5 times what they could in their home country and so they are going to make the damn most of it (and they can still undercut the indigenous labour).

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HOLA4416

You're wasting your breath Harry. There's a hardcore group of people who still think that Eastern Europeans are in the UK working 12 hour shifts out of some altruistic work-ethic, when the real reason is of course because they can earn 4-5 times what they could in their home country and so they are going to make the damn most of it (and they can still undercut the indigenous labour).

Its not just unskilled minimum wage jobs too. Local boss was bragging to me how had too foreign national graduates working on his website for NMW. They are making a mess of it and dragging it out, but he still thinks he's getting a bargain.

So to some extent NMW has brought higher paid tasks down to a level. Its a bit like a communist country where everyone gets paid the same (in theory).

IMO the main motivation behind NMW was to attract in more foreign workers.

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HOLA4417

More likely they are working in the fields picking produce that Brits are too proud and lazy to do themselves.

Yep, if only there was somewhere those lazy Brits could migrate to and earn the equivalent of £60k a year pulling leeks...

Edited by PopGun
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HOLA4418

FFS not the lump of labor fallacy fallacy again?! Right up there with 'Trickle down', I'm surprised and disappointed people still resort to that tripe to be honest.

Some strange thing happened two years a go where I lived. All the Eastern Europeans left and suddenly, all the locals were miraculously cured of lazyitis, and managed to fill the jobs those hard working immigrants abandoned. Big coincidence eh?

An even bigger coincidence was that many of those cured where local youth, still living with their parents (so not having to worry about housing costs). How very odd...

Edited by PopGun
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HOLA4419

You're wasting your breath Harry. There's a hardcore group of people who still think that Eastern Europeans are in the UK working 12 hour shifts out of some altruistic work-ethic, when the real reason is of course because they can earn 4-5 times what they could in their home country and so they are going to make the damn most of it (and they can still undercut the indigenous labour).

+1, which is why the Bulgarians/Romanians will be undercutting the Polish/latvian and so on, you can buy a reasonable house in Bulgaria for under 10k (big cities excluded)

I almost went to germany for several months back in the 90's to earn at least double what I'd of earned here (manual work) i'm sure there was plenty of German's able to do the work but i'm guessing it was down mostly to economics. I didn't go in the end and actually bought a small place for £20k, if i'd of bought it say three to four years later it would of been about £60k, so actually worked out better in the end for me.

I would say most countries are on a par with how much, how hard the population want to work, things like benefits or no benefits will make big differences.

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HOLA4420

FFS not the lump of labor fallacy fallacy again?! Right up there with 'Trickle down', I'm surprised and disappointed people still resort to that tripe to be honest.

Some strange thing happened two years a go where I lived. All the Eastern Europeans left and suddenly, all the locals were miraculously cured of lazyitis, and managed to fill the jobs those hard working immigrants abandoned. Big coincidence eh?

An even bigger coincidence was that many of those cured where local youth, still living with their parents (so not having to worry about housing costs). How very odd...

The lump of labour fallacy is not tripe. There is no "lump of labour".

See, for example, this study on the relationship between unemployment and immigration in the EU:

Although no definitive answer can be found by correlation analysis it is clear that there is a very consistent and telling trend in the relationship between unemployment and immigration. When unemployment lowers, immigration tends to increase. Results from this analysis suggest that immigration cannot be regarded as a factor that creates or adds to unemployment. In fact the opposite conclusion is more plausible; migrants are likely to move to where jobs are available, especially since the recession took place. A recommendation for policymakers is to utilise immigration to stimulate to employment. For example, if unemployment rates are lowering, nation states should look to increase the rate and number of immigration. Furthermore, a continual populist myth of ‘high immigration = high unemployment’ needs to be responsibly tackled by the media, especially when there is little to no evidence supporting such claims. Unemployment and immigration are complex phenomena but it looks like the relationship between the two has a simple rule of thumb – low levels of unemployment create higher levels of immigration.
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HOLA4421

. A plumber I know told me how hard it is to get Brits to start in the trade, many who object to getting their clothes dirty. The East Europeans just get down to it and turn up on time.

.

Well you can tell the plumber you know that he is talking nosh. We run up to 30 sub contract plumbers at any one time. Most are Brits, most work their **** off, most finish the day filthy. Plenty of experience of non Brits turning up late, poor work ethic etc.

You have accused people of being racist. You are one yourself.

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HOLA4422

Like translators at schools and hospitals.

My Aunt taught in a london primary school until about 2006. Towards the end of her career her class looked like an assembly of the United Nations albeit 5 year olds. The school had to employee an ever increasing army of translators from the immigrant community.

Anyway you are right immigration creates lots of jobs......

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HOLA4423

Yes, it would be silly of me to maintain that immigration has no negative impact on the indigenous workforce. However, it is not the whole story - the huge growth in the number in employment is evidence of that. The reality lies somewhere in between the two viewpoints. Exactly where is the debatable point.

The row over the closure of Tesco's distribution plant in Harlow has been reignited by Labour's Shadow Immigration Minister Chris Bryant. He claims workers may have lost their jobs only to be replaced by cheaper migrant labour

This stuff is happening right here right now...

I can speak from personal experience where I was made redundant 7 years ago by one of the big four supermarkets so they could shift my job from London to Northamptonshire where they had just opened a brand new depot staffed almost exclusively by Eastern Europeans on lower costs contracts.

Put your indigenous population out of work as there is more profit to be made by employing imported labour at cheaper rates.

Anyone who cannot acknowledge this has their head buried in the sand.

I had 20 odd years service so walked away with a good deal which I was happy with. I was also the Union Rep and involved in the site closure discussions. The firm made no secret of the fact why they were doing this and mentioned at the time they would continue to do it.

Tesco and the news story above emphasises the point that it is still going on.

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HOLA4424

The lump of labour fallacy is not tripe. There is no "lump of labour".

See, for example, this study on the relationship between unemployment and immigration in the EU:

A nice unbiased source that...

Selective extrapolation at it's best, I'd rather have the raw data.

The lump of labour fallacy is an outdated theory no longer valid due to the shifting variables of the modern globalised economy. Unless you're Paul Krugman of course.

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HOLA4425

The row over the closure of Tesco's distribution plant in Harlow has been reignited by Labour's Shadow Immigration Minister Chris Bryant. He claims workers may have lost their jobs only to be replaced by cheaper migrant labour

This stuff is happening right here right now...

I can speak from personal experience where I was made redundant 7 years ago by one of the big four supermarkets so they could shift my job from London to Northamptonshire where they had just opened a brand new depot staffed almost exclusively by Eastern Europeans on lower costs contracts.

Put your indigenous population out of work as there is more profit to be made by employing imported labour at cheaper rates.

Anyone who cannot acknowledge this has their head buried in the sand.

I had 20 odd years service so walked away with a good deal which I was happy with. I was also the Union Rep and involved in the site closure discussions. The firm made no secret of the fact why they were doing this and mentioned at the time they would continue to do it.

Tesco and the news story above emphasises the point that it is still going on.

I also know of a place near me where the entire work force was replaced by cheaper migrant labour.

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