The EU and its free movement of labour policy has continued to worsening employment conditions and poor wages.Employees travel to the UK and are prepared to work for very low wages and minimal employment rights.
Really? nice Urban myth you have there Tillson
The Tory fallacy: that migrants are taking British jobs and driving down wages
Vince Cable
The
leaked proposals on post-Brexit immigration give us a useful insight into the government’s thought processes. The desire seems largely to be about addressing “public concern” over pressure on public services, depression of wages and displacement of UK workers: that is,
issues of perception, whether or not they are real.
Post-Brexit immigration: 10 key points from the Home Office document
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That policy is driven by an obsession with meeting the net
immigration target of “tens of thousands”: despite it being continually exceeded since the Conservative pledge was made seven years ago; despite its dependence on levels of emigration over which the government has absolutely no control; and despite the
inclusion of overseas students in the net immigration numbers whose contribution we now know to be massively overstated.
The document makes much of the distinction between skilled and unskilled labour and between “hard” and “soft” skills. Bankers, engineers and footballers are welcome, but not hotel receptionists, care workers, chefs or cleaners. B
y implication, unskilled jobs should be reserved for British workers. But it isn’t clear where, with record levels of employment, the reserve army of unemployed, unskilled Britons is currently billeted.
At the heart of the politics of immigration is the belief, repeated by Theresa May as a fact, that immigrants, especially
unskilled immigrants, depress wages. At first sight the argument seems plausible – and undeniably there is low-wage competition in some places. But there is no evidence that this is a general problem. When the coalition embarked on its
review of EU competences in 2013, I commissioned a range of reviews and studies to establish the facts. They showed that the impact on wages was very small (and only in recession conditions). By and large, immigrants were doing jobs that British people didn’t want to do (or highly skilled jobs that helped to generate work for others). This research was inconvenient to the Home Office, which vetoed the publication of its results. I have now written to the prime minister to ask her to publish them as part of the current public debate.
Take note of the sentence I marked out in Bold.
