Ah, diddums. Employers are yelling the house down that they are having labour shortages in, ahem, the lower end of the skills range. That’s your fruit pickers, kitchen porters and the like.
Now I am not a fan of Brexit. It is a pain in the arse – if one could travel to Europe it’s difficult to say if I could drive there, what sort of IDP I would need etc etc. I’ve stopped using places like Thomann and any EU suppliers, because you can’t say what you will pay. Curiously enough the Chinese can still deliver ebay components into the country, but you can’t reliably order from the EU. So if you want to buy things in Global Britain, buy it from anywhere but the EU it seems. UK Component distributors are bellyaching about supply shortages.
Brexit is delivering
Back to the Brexit dividend. I would say these low-end skills shortages are a sign of Brexit working, in delivering what many people voted for. If you look at Lord Ashcrofts reason for leave a third wanted more control of immigration. The sentiment is stronger in the 2018 ESRC report, which also notes Remainers have a less accurate sense of what drives Leave than vice versa. The immigration issue is split in some unknown element from people who dislike immigrants and people disliking immigration separate from disliking immigrants, and the latter usually boils down to economic fears of spreading a pie that’s too small (jobs, schools, NHS, housing) more thinly. Although we have seen an increase in racist talk and events since the Brexit vote it’s nowhere near as much as feared at the time, perhaps favouring the economic over the racist. The West in general and perhaps Britain in particular is in a secular economic decline, against that background such concerns will rise in importance.
It’s just not true that Brits won’t do those jobs
I an old enough to remember a time when Brits did these jobs. I was one of them – a kitchen porter in the City of London in the university holidays. KPs are one of the labour shortages enumerated. Scaling for inflation I was working for less than today’s minimum wage. That’s not as bad as it sounds, because the rest of life, in particular rent/housing was cheaper in real terms in the 1980s than now. For some reason inflation figures do not usually reflect the cost of housing, though it’s very often the dominant part of a young person’s outgoings.
Fruit picking wasn’t always done by EU immigrants, although itinerant labour has historically been associated with that, so it’s not totally a freedom of movement thing. Back in the day (before Thatcher, roughly), Kent strawberry farms were big on PYO (pick your own) presumably because of the cost of labour meant packing all this stuff into plastic punnets wasn’t cost-effective.
Sure, people’s kids presumably scoffed half the weight paid for before it got weighed, but that was probably allowed for. In Suffolk, as I started in the late 1980s, I used to walk past the CITB training facility on the way to the pub – that’s the construction industry training board, where they used to teach local apprentices how to lay bricks and all the other good stuff that goes into construction. These same companies that are bellyaching now used to accept that they had to train their raw recruits.
So to be honest, I have little sympathy for these employers, particularly employers at the bottom end, yes, hospitality, I’m looking at you. Of course the rest of us will have to pay a bit more for our lobster. With a bit of luck the bottom end dirty chicken shops selling factory farmed fried chicken will go to the wall and there will be fewer Mickey Ds, and yes, Waitrose fruit and veg is going to be dearer for Guardianista metrosexuals, presumably Lidl and Aldi will find a different way.
People at the bottom end have been treated like shit for a long time due to a semi-infinite pool of young cheap labour that could be drawn on to push wages down. The official pack drill from erudite sources such as the Bank of England is basically move along now, nothing to see here.
There seems to be a broad consensus among academics that the share of immigrants in the workforce has little or no effect on native wages.
Hmm, so the usual laws of economics and supply and demand are suspended in this specific case? Let’s take another look
“If you look at the evidence of why we have seen wages going down, there is actually very little evidence that that is being caused by migration, aside from in construction.”
Labour MP Anneliese Dodds, 24 May 2018
And they wonder why Labour lost the red wall, FFS. Before somebody charges the Ermine with being Nigel Farage and claiming their £5, it is perfectly coherent that perhaps immigration is great for the UK economy as a whole, after all you get more shit done, perhaps for less. But at the same time a bit shit for some sectors of the population. I believe the art of managing who is in the end of the boat going up and who is where it’s going down is called politics, so it behooves a politician to not explicitly deny the reality of folk they want support from. Our present PM is a lesson in how to do that indirectly without copping flak for your BS 😉 So it does appear that you can come unstuck generalising the ‘it’s the economy, stupid‘ Clintonism too far.
Because – life experience ≠ the economy for those on the margins. Guess what – the poor tend to be the lower skilled, and jobs for the lower skilled are being stripped out of the economy and either automated or sent to lower-wage countries in the process of globalisation. For some of them, Brexit was a massive vote against globalisation, in a sort of stop the world, I want to get off way, by people who were shat on by it. Maybe they were allied with old gits dreaming of Imperial glory days and not needing a job, along with a fair few other reasons for disaffection, some of which are considered less than pretty. In a rare retrenchment, perhaps the unskilled will become a bit more/better employed, until clever people work out how to automate their jobs or eliminate them.
But if you want to avoid pushbacks like Brexit then you have to ease the pain of the people who get crushed by the policy and spread the win – Universal Basic Income, go steady on the whole Protestant Work Ethic, there’s nothing inherently beautiful about getting meaning from work, and just STFU about work is the route out of poverty – it hasn’t been since the 1970s. Particularly at the bottom end of the ability range. And before you start going on about education being an answer to that, you need to find something to put in the water supply to raise the ability range, because not everybody has skills that are valued in the marketplace. Or the inclination to develop suchlike. Not everyone has skills at all.
I am not sure there will be graduate jobs for the third of a million university applicants this year, though bless their young hearts if nursing and medicine are the rising star subjects, perhaps I am just being a cynical git…
And you may have to pay a bit more for your food, and hopefully bottom end fast food will be run out of town. Still, look on the bright side. Australian beef with free growth hormones will be cheaper. I guess the wine should be cheaper, though I’m not personally a great fan of Australian wine.
The return of the Great Barrington Declaration
Looks like Britain is adopting a modified from of the Great Barrington Declaration as far as dealing with Covid, starting with a Wembley super-spreader event to get it going.
We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.
I guess that’s one way of battle testing the irresistible force of contagion against the immovable object of vaccination, and the best of British luck to us all, eh. I do think if we are going to go the whole ceremonial magic approach of the GBD, which is basically the state of things will be what we declare, then we need to go the full Monty and do something about that NHS app. Ceremonial magic only works as a method of changing consciousness according to will if enough of the participants get with the program. That app’s gotta go.
There’s a small company supplying the project the Ermine is occasionally working on and they have been absolutely pole-axed by the self-isolation requirements. It’s not that there’s a pyramid of dead bodies piling high in the machine shop stinking the joint out. It’s that they haven’t got enough boots on the ground because of self-isolation, and they are running about trying to shovel jobs out as best they can, so they are sending out production jobs before the prototypes and occasionally measuring things from the wrong reference plane, presumably because the old boy who does that is self-isolating and the poor devil press-ganged into filling his shoes doesn’t have the domain knowledge.
Hospitality is spitting bricks on this subject, for once not on the vexed question of Brexit, but in a situation designed to serve lots of the general public, you will easily have waiters close to carriers, who then get close to kitchen staff, and all of a sudden you lose an entire shift of wait staff and back of house.
Magic only works in the places it will work if you believe in it, so if we are going to eschew epidemiology for English exceptionalism and the Great Barrington Declaration, or at the very least state that vaccination is going to save us, then you gotta believe in vaccination, and act that way – give all the vaccinated a free pass on the self-isolation thing and get those suckers back to work, pronto. All the time crossing one’s fingers and hoping that the Chirac doctrine that
“If you look at world history, ever since men began waging war, you will see that there’s a permanent race between sword and shield. The sword always wins.
doesn’t hold in this case. The shield has held in other germ fights – polio, TB, smallpox. But at the moment this is more magic than science IMO. It reminds me of another piece of magical thinking that didn’t quite go according to plan – George Bush’s Mission Accomplished speech
We shall see.
On the subject of magical thinking to assist the economy, Grant Shapps has decided that, in a similar vein, we don’t really giveashit about road safety – fresh in from the Twitter
We’re aware of a shortage of HGV drivers, so I’m announcing a temp extension of drivers’ hours rules from Mon 12 July, giving flexibility to drivers & operators to make slightly longer journeys.
“We’ve ramped up the number of driving tests available & will consider other measures.”
What the hell is it with man-children and Twitter? Grant Shapps’ Twitter feed really is an absolute delight of magical thinking and a blessed unfamiliarity with elementary logic and the scientific method. Sustainable aviation, for crying out loud. In a theoretical and intellectual way, sure it’s possible. It’s just that a 747 jetliner would take 1.5 hours of the output of Sizewell nuclear power station at full tilt, so something tells me this won’t scale – you get 18 daily long-haul aircraft movements per Sizewell… Heathrow is gonna need a hell of a lot of nuclear power stations for sustainable aviation1, and fuelling your 747s with biofuel stealing land for food in a world where that appears in short supply is just plain…wrong IMO. You’re gonna have to fly less or burn fossil fuels. Simples.
Dr Strangelove would like to fly sustainably. You know the pack drill, too cheap to meter…
Grant Shapps seems to have a very tenuous grasp of epistemology in general. Apparently there is no sign people are deleting the NHS app to avoid being commanded to self-isolate. Grant me old mucker, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It’s the oldest trick in the book – don’t ask questions to which you don’t want to hear the possible answers. Pity David Cameron didn’t jump to that re Brexit, but presumably Grant had his fingers in his ears and closed his eyes when the pretty young thing on t’telly said she was icing the app for just that reason. Curmudgeonly Ermines never installed the app, but that’s because I don’t carry a tracking device plugged into the hive mind around with me.
And avoid having big trucks behind you on the motorway at the end of the day, poor devils….
Now I’m not inherently against ceremonial magic and magical thinking. It’s not a bad way to change consciousness in accordance with will on a smallish scale. But use the right tool for the job. It’s a rum way to run something on the scale of a country. I guess we will find out about the wisdom of the Great Barrington Declaration in a couple of months. It is closer to fiat lux! than e=mc²
- There is a reasonable debate to be had as to whether nuclear power counts as low-carbon, given the amount of concrete you have to pour to keep the Bad Shit in, and there’s also a good argument to be made that it is a fossil fuel, albeit a low-carbon fossil fuel, particularly if the idea of sending nuclear waste by train to fast breeder reactors doesn’t give you a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. Considering something sustainable where you have to post keep-out warnings for tens of thousands of years is also stretching the definition of sustainable for some people. But I just don’t want to try to imagine the amount of wind power or solar to keep leisure flying at current levels. We will have more pressing uses for it, anyway ↩
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