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CBI calls for shake-up of labour laws |
British workers lack skills and |
CBI calls for shake-up of UK's labour laws
The CBI will only be happy when all workers are subject to agency workers terms and conditions.In a new report today, the CBI will call for a variety of labour market measures it says will bolster businesses during the recovery, including the right to more flexible working.
But against the backdrop of growing labour tensions, the business group also called for a shake-up of industrial relations laws.
With BT workers poised to walk out and British Airways reeling from the most damaging industrial dispute in its history, the CBI is calling for changes to rules around ballots so that strikes can only go ahead if 40% of the balloted workforce support it, as well as a simple majority of those voting.
Its Making Britain the Place to Work report also recommends the consultation period for collective redundancies be shortened from 90 days to 30 days to "reduce uncertainty for staff and allow employers to reshape their workforces swiftly to respond to significant falls in demand" ...
Guardian 21 June 2010 Agency WorkersCBI
Labour's Nick Palmer becomes first ex-MP to go on the dole
Far from browbeating him into accepting inappropriate work, his interviewer arranged a specialist CV review with a recruitment expert and several agencies focused on professional candidates.
He left the interview impressed at how he had been dealt with.
“It's a sensitive situation even for optimistic people like me, and I felt almost like giving him a hug,” he admitted.
But he was less optimistic for the future of the Jobcentre itself.
“I gather from other sources that the office is under new orders: to freeze recruitment, lay off all fixed-term staff and outsource much of their work to private companies,” he wrote.
“The shape of things to come may be more worrying.”
Telegraph 11 June 2010
We were wrong to allow so many eastern Europeans into Britain
There have been real economic gains from the arrival of young, hard-working migrants from eastern Europe over the past six years.
But there has also been a direct impact on the wages, terms and conditions of too many people – in communities ill-prepared to deal with the reality of globalisation, including the one I represent.
The result was, as many of us found in the election, our arguments on immigration were not good enough.
We faced rising anti-European sentiment with small parties claiming they could seal the borders ...
Observer 06 June 2010 Reflections on the Renewal of the Labour PartyEd Balls turns on Gordon Brown
Labour's immigration policy hurt wages of British workers
Suicides at Apple Factory in China Rock the Sweatshop Supply System
Many first equated Foxconn with suicides last summer when Sun Danyong, a 25-year-old worker who allegedly lost a prototype of the fourth-generation iPhone, jumped to his death.
Now, the suicides have built into a crisis for Apple and Foxconn, one that activists could push to crack the abusive relationship between between corporations and their suppliers that drives wages and working conditions ever downward across the globe.
A shocking 12 Foxconn workers have now ended their lives this year, mostly by jumping from the massive multi-story dormitories they live in during the precious few off hours they have. The crisis is so deep the company has installed safety nets between dorm buildings.
All those who have committed suicide have been between the ages of 18 and 24 and are part of a young generation of migrant workers attracted to jobs in the cities who then face terrible conditions.
While these workers’ struggles could have been forgotten, their important role in the global supply chain of high-priced, high-demand devices like the iPhone and the iPad is keeping their stories in the media ...
LaborNotes 02 June 2010 China
BNP can't count on Barking breakthrough
The free market dogma has never been explained to voters in this country, most of whom are unaware of the con that has been perpetrated on them. It's very convenient, therefore, that immigration takes the flak whilst conventiently - for Davos Man - it does it's prime job: keeping wages depressed, and employed people in fear of the P45. People can vote for the BNP if they wish, but there's no road away from the global con by scapegoating migrants. They're just victims of the IMF and WTO, like the rest of us.Nick Griffin has racialised housing issues but the area's problems aren't unique and BNP success can be rolled back ...
A key contest in this election is in Barking, between the BNP's Nick Griffin and Labour's Margaret Hodge.
On the face of it, all the ingredients for an electoral breakthrough by the BNP appear to be here: rising unemployment, housing problems, deep poverty, a growing proportion of immigrants and asylum seekers, and a local Labour party that has presided over decades of impoverishment.
The decline of industry in Barking and Dagenham, accelerated by Ford Dagenham's decision to cease car production in 2002, means the proportion of local people employed in manufacturing has fallen from 40% in the early 1990s to less than half that figure today.
Unemployment in the borough now stands at close to 10% and average incomes are the lowest in London. The borough has some of the lowest literacy and numeracy levels in the country and more than a third of its children are born into poverty ...
What is specific to Barking is the pace of change.
Its overall population, not just its proportion of ethnic minorities, is one of the fastest growing in the country.
This population competes for scarce resources. Council housing stock has fallen from 40,000 to 18,000 as a consequence of Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy initiative in the 1980s, and the failure of Barking and Dagenham council to build any public housing for the past quarter of a century.
There are now more than 28,000 people on the local social housing waiting list ...
Guardian 16 April 2010 Inequality Housing
Gordon Brown promises 'controlled' immigration
It's another 'third face of power' job. Brown is not expected to say that immigration keeps wage demands in check.
A re-elected Labour government will deliver a "controlled and fair" immigration system flexible enough to meet the needs of British business, Gordon Brown will promise ...
The PM will call on all mainstream parties to present "a united front" against those who seek to bring a halt to immigration simply because of their animosity towards migrants.
"The question is who has the best plan to control immigration - not who can appeal to our worst instincts of nationalism and xenophobia, but who can appeal to our best instincts of a fairer Britain for all," Mr Brown is expected to say ...
Telegraph 31 Mar 2010Brown admits 'misusing' immigration statistics
That such conditions exist is a scandal, and all the more appalling for having happened under Labour's watch ...EHRC food factories report:
Perfect storm has led to a race to the bottom
The EHRC report has simply put an official stamp on what many of us have known – and been deeply worried about – since early 2000.
A combination of factors – deregulation, globalisation, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the formation of new pools of labour thanks to the expansion of the EU – led to a race to the bottom in terms of labour standards.
The food and drink sector, driven by the supermarkets, has been at the forefront of this. New technology that allows supermarkets to order at the last minute only what they know they can sell has resulted in an unprecedented casualisation of labour, not just in rich western countries but in the poorer countries, too.
Labour standards have been driven down everywhere.
The impact has been obvious on the ground for a very long time. In the UK the effect is particularly apparent in rural areas – but because many of these areas are Conservative, the government for too long ignored the protests of local workers, or dismissed them as xenophobic hostility to migrants ...
Guardian 13 Mar 2010 Social DarwinismViolence and abuse rife in food factories
The Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman said the goverment had blundered earlier this decade when it brought in a new regime under which mergers and acquisitions were assessed purely on competition grounds.Public interest test for takeovers should be reintroduced, says Vince Cable
The failings of this approach became obvious, Cable told the Radio 4's Today Programme this morning, when Kraft launched its hostile attack on Cadbury.
"What Peter Mandelson promised was huge government opposition and in reality there was no opposition – it just melted away," said Cable. "We ought to have a public interest test again, and we ought to look at the role of the hedge funds who take over large holdings for small periods during a takeover battle." ...
Guardian 10 Feb 2010Kraft’s jobs pledge was always risky
Kraft deserves public anger
Mandelson attacks Kraft
Defend UK firms from foreign takeovers
Brown warns Kraft on jobs
Brown's bluster in regard to the Kraft takeover of Cadbury is a cynical attempt
to pretend that the government can influence Kraft's jobs and investment policies.
Agreement by Cadbury to a £11.9bn takeover bid from its US rival Kraft Foods prompted Gordon Brown today to warn the American conglomerate to protect jobs in the West Midlands.
Cadbury accepted defeat in its battle to stay independent by recommending a £11.9bn takeover from Kraft, ending one of the most fiercely contested takeovers in the City for some time.
Cadbury employs 6,000 people in the UK and the Unite union expressed fears that the deal would lead to job losses as the US company puts a priority on paying back its debt. "Whatever good intentions Kraft may have towards Cadbury's workforce, the sad truth is there will be an irresistible imperative to pay down their debt, and this raises real fears for jobs and investment in this country," said Jennie Formby at the union.
But the prime minister said today: "The one thing I want to say is this: we are determined that the levels of investment that take place in Cadbury's in the United Kingdom are maintained. And we are determined, of course, that at a time when people are worried about their jobs, that jobs in Cadbury can be secure" ...
Guardian 19 Jan 2010The sad lesson of Cadbury is the City still holds the whip
£2m a day cost of Cadbury deal – plus £12m for the boss
Mergers and acquisitions
Private Equity
Influx of 1.5m eastern Europeans means UK's lowest-paid workers are earning less ...Eastern European immigration 'has hit low-paid Britons'
... the report, written by the Migration Policy Institute, claims the contribution of the new migrants to the UK's economy is "probably small but positive", it concludes that there is evidence that "the recent migration may have reduced wages slightly at the bottom end of the labour market, especially for certain groups of vulnerable workers".
It also claims there is a risk that the recent influx "could contribute to a 'low-skill equilibrium' in some economically depressed local areas" ...
The report also acknowledges the use of eastern European labour to fill unskilled jobs may result in "a vicious circle in which employers fail to invest in increasing the skills in their workforce".
It suggests if the trend continues it "runs the risk of perpetuating the existence of substantial numbers of temporary jobs with unsociable hours that are increasingly only attractive to migrant workers" ...
Observer 17 Jan 2010 Global Labour Market
About 900 jobs will be lost after the motor parts maker Bosch announced the closure of its south Wales plant ...Bosch to quit south Wales with the loss of 900 jobs
The firm says it has now decided to recommend closure to its board, transferring work to Hungary in 2011.
Management of the German-owned company spent Thursday informing the workforce, following three months of consultation ...
Plant director Adam Willmott said move was one of "pure economics" after a feasibility study had concluded the switch to Hungary, where labour costs were 65% of those at the plant, was necessary to gain the benefit of economies of scale ...
BBC NEWS 15 Jan 2010
Nine giant new wind farms in the seas around Britain will be announced today, but few of the 6,000 turbines needed are likely to be built here.Wind farms could power half of Britain’s homes, but jobs could go overseas
Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, will say that the world’s biggest expansion of offshore wind power, costing £75 billion, will create 70,000 jobs in Britain by 2020.
However, the Government has failed to persuade any of the major wind turbine manufacturers to open a factory in Britain. The companies granted licences today to build the farms will not be obliged to source any parts from domestic manufacturers and most are expected to buy turbines made in Denmark or Germany.
A taskforce of officials from Downing Street, the Treasury and the business and energy departments has held talks with suppliers in recent months including Siemens, Vestas, Mitsubishi and General Electric, but none is yet willing to commit to manufacturing in Britain ...
The British Wind Energy Association said yesterday that the cost of building wind turbines had doubled in recent years, partly because of the fall in the value of sterling and a growing reliance on imports.
Each megawatt of wind capacity announced today will cost up to £3.1 million, compared with £1.5 million for the first offshore wind farms approved a decade ago.
John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK, said: “The Government’s role is clear: train and equip Britain’s workforce to ensure that the thousands of jobs that will be created are filled by British workers, and provide the economic certainty investors need to complete these projects on time and on budget.”
Times 08 Jan 2010Generating power and jobs?
Crown Estates names winners of wind farms bid
Peter Mandelson back in Brown fold but cabinet tensions simmer on
Business secretary re-enters fray despite doubts over leadership and strategy ...sumthingtosayGuardian 06 Jan 2010
6 Jan 2010, 10:33AM
Mandelson is CREATING unemployment, by ensuring that all the supposed 'fiscal stimulus' spending has gone to overseas companies who, can then, in line with the structures he has ensured are in place, bring in their cheaper foreign work forces - while UK workers are on welfare.
He is not into relying on 'Labour's core vote' because workers hate him.
And if the public knew what is in the trade agreements he initiated, and to which the EU is committing us - including Mode 4, irreversibly opening to firms like Tata bringing in their own cheap labour, they will hate him a lot more.
It is his responsiblity to expose the implications of these trade agreements to the people he is there to serve, but he is keeping it hidden.
Why aren't journalists asking these questions, the ones that matter to people?
Lets hope that sometime, Mandelson gets what's coming to him. But it will be with no thanks to sycophantic, or should that be sickophantic, journos who play along with him.>Mandelson set to back Brown's budget deficit strategy
Arrival of 30,000 migrant IT workers 'deprives Britons of jobs’
Tens of thousands of foreign IT workers are being sent to work for their companies’ subsidiaries in Britain, sparking fears that British workers are being denied job opportunities.
Almost 30,000 non-EU technology workers entered the country under so-called intra-company transfers last year, with the overwhelming majority coming from India.
Most of those arriving came for low and mid-level IT jobs where there are not significant skills shortages among British-born workers, fuelling suspicion that British workers are losing out to foreign workers who are being paid lower wages.Ann Swain, the chief executive of the Association of Professional Staffing Companies, which represents recruitment companies, said that such transfers were designed to allow specialists within a particular company to fill senior positions abroad. But he added that they were being abused to fill lower level roles in which the skills used are largely standardised ...
Times 05 Jan 2010
Johnson: we need a debate on migration
Labour's failure to engage with issue 'has boosted BNP' admits Home Secretary
When politicians call for a debate, you can
be sure they want no such thing.
Fresh from 'no' to any debate on cannabis and alcohol,
we should treat Alan Johnson's latest round of headline seeking with the 'caveat emptor' it deserves.
Since Blair and Mandelson hijacked the Labour Party, and created an alternative Thatcherite platform from which to push
Mandelson's neoliberal philosophy, it's been open house to the
global labour market.
In abandoning it's former core supporters in favour of the 'free market' Washington Consensus it
needed a mechanism to both keep a clamp on wages and also to
'multi-culturalise' 'racist' Britain.
What they got - especially after Brown's 'no more boom and bust' nostrum went belly-up - was a revival of the so-called 'far right' in the shape of the
British National Party.
In doing so the BNP's new supporters failed to notice - for very understandable reasons - that migrants into this country are victims of exactly the same forces
which neoliberal 'free markets' exert globally on all except the favoured few - the global 'movers and shakers' - that meet-up at
Davos once a year.
Johnson, too, has failed to notice any of this, for the less forgivable reason that he is unaffected by it, safe - for now - inside the Westminster bubble.
Why so defensive on migration, Brown?
The little Englanders and zero-immigration merchants, never mind the BNP and its ilk, talk for a tiny minority of public opinion.
People don't want to see immigration stopped: they understand the economic benefits, they like our multicultural society ... [Gdn]EU migration is working
Poland has much better vocational education than the UK and many of the Poles had served the sort of apprenticeships at home that are now rare in the UK — hence the rise of the legendary "Polish plumber".
These skilled trades people have brought clear benefits to consumers, often doing a better job for a lower price ... [Gdn]Tim Finch, IPPR
Gordon Brown's immigration speech
Gordon Brown pledges new migrant limits
Labour has helped BNP by shying away from immigration debate
The immigration debate we need
Do Labour's immigration scaremongers fool anybody?
Wildcat strikes will go nuclear
The current dispute has two dimensions. One is that the workers concerned are capable and willing, unlike many other workers (unionised or not), to take robust collective action to defend their right to work in the midst of a recession. This comes down not just to being unionised but being well organised at the workplace level with shop stewards, mass meetings and a collective confidence to act. Underlying this is the nature of the labour market in the industry where job security is absent with building projects beginning and ending when completed, with employment contracts based on this.
The second is that the employers are militant and hardnosed. During the first strike in January and February, Total and its contractor said they would not negotiate with the unions unless the workers went back to work. Shortly after they relented, and a deal was struck before the workers' returned to work. This time the nuclear button has been pressed with the sackings: reapply for your job by Monday next week on the condition of ending the strike or consider that you've dismissed yourself. The nuclear option has been backed up by refusing to allow the conciliation service Acas to get involved to resolve the dispute ...
... if the industry is going to be able to avoid another subsequent dogfight over the right to work then big changes are needed.
The first is an explicit and binding industry agreement that is not only watertight on this issue of job security but also has an independent body to monitor and enforce it.
Another is that the EU Posted Workers' Directive is revised so that employers are not allowed to legally bring in workers from outside to undermine the wages and conditions of those already working. My money's on further trouble ahead.
Guardian 19 June 2009Refinery sackings spark walkouts
Hundreds walk out in support of sacked oil refinery workers
Oil plant sackings spark walkouts
Total sacks 900 oil plant workers
GMB
Redundancy scam
Protectionism: is it so bad?
... there is evidence to prove that free trade has not served well the richest economy in the world.
The US showed remarkable growth together with a rise in real wages for a majority of its population up until the late 1960s.
This was a period when the US manufacturing industries were in good health and were still protected from foreign competition by tariffs (taxes on foreign imports). Since 1973, however, when it turned to quasi free trade, the country has seen declining levels of real wage for around 80 percent of its workforceas high wage manufacturing sector jobs have been replaced by low wage service sector jobs.
The benefits of free trade have only accrued to the owners and CEOs of large multinational corporations which have been able to outsource production to low wage countries. Of course there has been overall GDP growth but that says nothing about how the benefits of this growth were distributed. Besides, the current financial crisis bares for all to see how consumer demand during the recent years was built upon the foundations of unsustainable debt.
Many free trade economists argue that the consumers benefit the most from free trade since it lowers the costs of goods and services. These economists forget that the same consumers are also workers and wage earners. If they lose jobs due to decline in manufacturing and increased outsourcing or are forced into low wage sectors of the economy due to free trade, their purchasing power is reduced. For one who suffers wage loss in tandem with falling prices there are hardly any benefits from free trade to brag about ...
openDemocracy 13 April 2009This recession will hasten the shift to a new economic world order
Goldman Sachs predicts Indian incomes to become world-class by 2030
Free trade – or fair trade?
Fear for deal on agency workers' payoffs
A government-brokered deal between trade unions and employers to improve agency workers' rights is threatening to unravel as tens of thousands of people are laid off without redundancy benefits.
No 10 has been accused of allowing employers to treat agency workers as "cannon fodder" after refusing to extend their rights to cover notice periods and compensation for loss of jobs.
Labour backbenchers, union leaders and Downing Street disagree about which benefits should be incorporated into UK law from the newly ratified EU agency workers directive.
One prominent parliamentary campaigner has questioned whether the government is backtracking on its promises. The TUC would like redundancy and job protection benefits included in the regulations.
Unions want the government to fast-track any new protection so it is introduced well before December, 2011 - the final date set by the EU for incorporation into UK law.
There are fears, according to Whitehall sources, that the two ministers in charge of the legislation, Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, and Pat McFadden, the employment minister, are anxious not to offend business and may not be sympathetic to union demands.
Mandelson, according to Whitehall sources, sent for the entire package of measures agreed for the Queen's speech, including legislation on the directive, to see how business friendly it was - with the aim of going for the minimal protection allowed by law ...
Guardian 21 February 2009Peter Mandelson
BMW accused of 'scandalous opportunism'
after scrapping 850 jobs at Mini factoryBMW came under furious criticism yesterday after it said it was laying off 850 agency workers at its plant in Cowley, near Oxford, where it makes the Mini.
Union leaders attacked the decision to end the weekend shift, which the company blamed on falling demand. Opposition politicians seized on the announcement to argue the cutbacks showed the government's measures to support the automotive industry were not working.
Tony Woodley, joint general secretary of the union Unite, described BMW's decision as "scandalous" and his union demanded immediate government action to protect agency workers, who have fewer employment rights than full-time colleagues ...
Agency workers are a feature of employment in the motor industry, allowing manufacturers to adjust more easily to changes in demand, both up and down. But the BMW decision has reignited last year's row over the European agency workers directive, which is designed to give agency staff greater employment rights.
Unite said the government could act to bring in legislation to protect agency workers. The joint general secretary, Derek Simpson, said: "There are currently one million agency workers in the UK who can be sacked without any notice ... The current inequalities between agency workers and full-time employees must end." ...
Guardian 17 February 2009Q&A: Rights for agency workers
Plea to protect ‘vulnerable’ agency workers
Warnings over changes to law on agency workers
Car firm cuts 850 agency workers
The Benefits Of Employing Agency Workers and Contractors
Hundreds march at new power stations over foreign labour
Yesterday's protests included a march on a job centre in Newark, Nottinghamshire, where unemployed local people say they have lost out to Spanish and Polish workers on 850 jobs. A small number of engineers at the nearby Staythorpe site, where an advanced gas turbine power station is being built, walked out in support in spite of disciplinary warnings. Approximately 300 local demonstrators were joined by 200 outside supporters, including veterans of last week's successful action at Total's Lindsey refinery on the Humber estuary. ...
Saville Wells, 64, said: "We've no objection to foreign lads coming to work here but we should have been given a fair chance. Instead, they brought in their own people as a package.
"It was a done deal. It's threatening the system that's worked well for everybody for the 47 years I've been in the trade. These demonstrations are peaceful. We want to persuade them, to win the argument that way."
Younger protesters said that they were starting to think that the industry had no future, with "package deals" involving complete imported workforces spreading by the week. Adam Hughes, 26, from Wrexham, said: "I did four years' apprenticeship to become a pipeworker but I can see that I may have to change my job. This is happening all over. There's a big power station due down at Pembroke, but they've started building hostel foundations there. Will that be for British workers? I don't think so." ...
Guardian 12 February 2009
Gordon Brown should be embarrassed ...
[Borrowing slogans from the BNP: not one Brown's best ideas]
Most embarrassed at all of this should be the Prime Minister ... (whose) ... notorious speech of two years ago, in which he spoke of “British jobs for British workers”, has come back to bite him.
Many of the demonstrators in Lincolnshire, Teeside, Grangemouth and South Wales have been brandishing placards bearing those very words.
The PM’s comments ... were also so much cant coming from the leader of a party which, in its 12 years in office, has loosened controls over immigration and presided over the biggest influx of migrant workers the UK has ever experienced.
However, they did encapsulate what many in this country have long felt, namely, that British workers, in our deregulated labour market, do have it tougher than those in other countries ...
The Times 30 January 2009What is the dispute about?
Support demo over foreign staff
British workers for British jobs says Brown
The Chancellor put a new emphasis on "Britishness" at the heart of his programme for government when he takes over from Tony Blair in three weeks' time.
"It is time to train British workers for the British jobs that will be available over the coming few years and to make sure that people who are inactive and unemployed are able to get the new jobs on offer in our country," Mr Brown told the GMB union.
Mr Brown said he wanted to sign partnerships with all the major industries that they would help British workers to access the jobs that were available ...
Telegraph 07 Jun 2007Foreign advert ban puts British workers first
Gordon Brown pledges jobs for British workers
'British jobs' blows up in the PM's face
'We've done something terrible
to ourselves in Britain'"In the name of trying to prepare people for some new multicultural society we've told people, particularly long-term inhabitants, 'Well your cultural background isn't really very important, or it's flawed, or you shouldn't be worrying about it'.
And then we've been shocked that far from producing the new model citizen who easily adapts to multiculturalism, people are very resistant, very fearful and very lacking in self-confidence.
And we have the same problem with some second- and third-generation immigrant communities who say they don't know what British values are and that they're alienated." ...
The Guardian 27 September 2007
Immigration 'harming communities'
Rapid immigration has damaged community relations in parts of England, a report by the Commons communities and local government committee says.
In three areas with high immigration - Peterborough, Burnley, and Barking and Dagenham - community cohesion is among the lowest in the country, the MPs say.
The report said there was "significant public anxiety" over issues such as pressure on public services. ...
BBC NEWS 16 July 2008
Migrant builder took home £8.80 for a week
Eastern European migrants working on the construction of a £600m NHS hospital have been taking home as little as £8.80 for a 39-hour week, the Guardian has learned, in what has been described by union bosses as one of the worst instances of employee abuse in the building sector since EU enlargement.
The group of around 12 men, most of whom are Lithuanian, are construction workers on the government-backed PFI project in Nottinghamshire. Though allegations of abuse of migrants' rights on construction sites are widespread across the country the scale in this instance has shocked unions and politicians.
Michael Clapham, MP for Barnsley West and Penistone, who is due to raise the matter in parliament today, said: "This happened on a government project where there are good rules and a strong union - who knows what is happening on the hundreds of smaller sites around the UK?" ...
Guardian 30 June 2008
Britons are unemployed because of 'lack of motivation'
Britons are out of work because they lack motivation and "employability", not because of competition with foreign workers, ministers said.
The arrival of a million Eastern Europeans in the past four years has not damaged wages or led to an increase in unemployment among natives, the Department for Work and Pensions insisted.
But some Britons were on the dole because of "issues around basic employability skills, incentives and motivation", its report said.
The attack on the native workforce came as the Government published a separate study in which they admitted that an influx of foreigners is causing social tensions in areas unprepared for large-scale immigration. ...
Telegraph 12 June 2008
Managing the impacts of migration
The Government's commitments to managing migration focus on five key areas:www.communities.gov.uk 10 June 2008
- Strengthening our borders. We have created a single borders force with new powers to target those coming here illegally, electronic controls to count people in and out of the country and the introduction of ID cards for all foreign nationals. A new points based system will allow us to select those most able to make a positive contribution to the UK.
- Improving population data by making changes to the way in which we record the number of migrants coming here and where they settle. We are supporting the Office for National Statistics, who are working with local Government to ensure we have the most accurate, up to date data that effectively capture local population change. New figures will be used to inform the 3 year funding settlement for Local Government in 2011.
- Providing funding where needed to help manage the transitional impacts of migration. The Home Office Green Paper on The Path to Citizenship, published in February 2008, set out a proposal to set up a fund to manage the transitional impacts of migration. Money for the fund will be raised through increases to certain fees for immigration applications. The fund aims to be operating from April 2009 and may be spent on building the capacity of local service providers to manage the impacts of migration. For example, it could be spent on improving mapping of communities and local data; on information websites which provide information for migrants coming to the UK; or on English language training or interpretation services. However, this list is not exhaustive and we would expect the money to be spent on a wide range of issues according to local need. The Government has already made additional resources available - such as for schools experiencing growth in pupil numbers.
- Protecting workers: People who do come here to live and work have a right to be treated fairly. The overwhelming majority of employers are responsible but in some sectors employers are undercutting minimum wage and exploiting migrant workers. This leaves migrant workers vulnerable and can also leave British workers struggling to compete. We are toughening the action that can be taken against unscrupulous employers who knowingly hire illegal workers as well as commencing a sector by sector enforcement of the National Minimum Wage starting with the hotel industry.
- Promoting integration. Ensuring that migrants are part of strong cohesive communities. The Government has rebalanced its community cohesion strategy to put a major new focus on mapping of local issues to devise local solutions, moving away from a one size fits all approach. This emphasises the role of national Government in providing a framework for local authorities to build cohesion and a shared sense of local belonging and work to build integration. The Government framework includes guidance on where translation is appropriate, greater emphasis on English language learning, information packs for migrants, citizen days and work to tackle misconceptions of migrants that can lead to tensions. This has been supported by £50m cohesion funding over three years.
BNP votes are a cry of white working-class anguish
... we ... need to address the biggest worries of BNP voters. Most of them are anxious about immigration not because they don’t want different-looking people walking the streets, but because they feel it damages them, in three distinct ways: through housing, wages, and the unequal provision of public services.
It’s true that immigrants boost the economy overall ... But it’s also true that British people don’t benefit equally from it.
It’s simply a fact that if you significantly increase the supply of cheap labour, the hourly rate for it comes down: that’s why wages for builders and waitresses and cleaners have barely budged for ten years now.
For people on the lowest wages, immigration does depress their wages, and it is wrong to deny this, or wave it away as unimportant. Instead, we must advocate a simple non-sectarian answer: a higher minimum wage ... instead of offering these solutions, we have turned the white working class into a national punch-line.
We dismiss them as “chavs”, “pikeys” and racists, and jeer at their clothes, voices and names. So we don’t really have the right to act surprised when they vote in a way designed to tell us – as the woman standing in her damp flat, carrying bags of economy-brand food from Iceland, told me – to “fuck off.”
Independent 05 May 2008
Ethnic middle classes join the 'white flight'
Over the years that 48-year-old Ray Jellicoe has lived in his patch of east Birmingham, the one constant has been change.
Once a traditional white working-class neighbourhood, he says it was always home to a large Irish and black population but is now becoming more and more Asian.
And so it reflects in microcosm the shifting face of Britain's second city, where whites will be in the minority within 15 years. ...
... A poll published this weekend by charity the Barrow Cadbury Trust dismisses tabloid images of a segregated nation at war with itself, concluding that more than two thirds of respondents in Birmingham consider relations between different communities to be good, while almost half thought there was more integration between communities than a generation ago. ...
Yet beneath the optimism runs a worrying thread: concern about so-called 'white flight', or the exodus of better-off families from the inner cities to the suburbs and villages - a movement now joined by the black and Asian middle classes as their prosperity increases.
'What we are aware of in Birmingham is that there is middle-class flight, that in fact the better educated and those with better incomes - whether they come from white backgrounds or the various ethnic-minority backgrounds - are moving out of the inner cities,' said Sukhvinder Stubbs, chief executive of the Barrow Cadbury Trust. ...
The Observer 20 April 2008
The £6bn fallacy
[My italics throughout - Tom MacF]
There is no evidence that net immigration can generate significant economic benefits
The government told the inquiry that migrants contributed £6bn to Britain's GDP in 2006. Sounds great, but it's completely meaningless.
Smith will no doubt have taught her economics students that the key measure of a country's standard of living is GDP per head, not total GDP.
In percentage terms, immigration has increased Britain's population almost in step with the impact on GDP. So the effect on GDP per head has been roughly zero.
The government also claims lots of migrants are needed to fill vacancies created by Britain's booming economy over the past 15 years. This is beguilingly simple, but badly flawed.
Once migrants fill some vacancies they spend some of their earnings. This increases demand for goods and services, which leads companies to produce more.
But to increase production, companies need more staff, creating more vacancies and so defeating the objective of reducing vacancies. The total number of vacancies has remained at about 600,000 since 2001 despite high net immigration.
Surely immigration is needed for jobs Britons refuse to do, the government argues. But they refuse to do these jobs only at current pay rates.
In many cases, higher wages - never popular with employers - could solve the "shortage". In other cases increased mechanisation could bypass the need for migrant labour.
Many employers today rely on the skills and hard work of migrants. But in the longer run, when wages can be increased and production methods changed, there is no valid argument for continued high net immigration.
Related to this is the effect on wages. While immigration was found to deliver a small gain in the wages of the highly paid, it has a slightly negative effect on the wages of the lowest paid, as many migrants compete for relatively low-skilled jobs.
Any negative effect for people earning little more than the minimum wage must be taken seriously.
The third plank of the government's argument is that migrants' net tax payments (taxes paid minus consumption of public services) are greater than those of UK-born citizens.
Such conclusions depend on who counts as a migrant and what is included under costs and benefits; some estimates show migrants contributing slightly less than the UK-born. But even on the government's preferred calculations, the fiscal impact is too small, relative to the size of the economy, to justify high net immigration.
Housing is something else the government has not addressed.
It is projected that if net immigration were zero, house prices would be 10% lower in 20 years' time - an important issue for those struggling to get on the property ladder.
The government's central projection is that Britain will continue to have high net immigration of 190,000 a year. If correct, Britain's population would rise by more than 10 million to 71 million in 2031, with just over two-thirds of the increase due to net immigration.
The government should review the implications, though any changes in policy would essentially concern those outside Europe as most EU citizens have the automatic right to work in Britain.
While the government has overstated the economic benefits, it is important to stress that we did not find large losses, and we recognise the valuable contribution migrants make. Our points are about high net immigration, which sharply increases population, not immigration per se.
Since many people continue to emigrate, there could still be substantial immigration without an overall population increase. The committee hopes its report stimulates much needed debate on the amount and type of immigration that is desirable.
But to assert, without rigorous evidence, that high net immigration brings huge economic benefits is simply unacceptable.
The Guardian 01 April 2008
Underpaid, easy to sack
The government will face a challenge from unions tomorrow over the impact of migration on Labour's core working-class voters. The use of agency workers, most of them migrants, to drive down the pay and conditions of British workers is the sort of contentious issue the Labour leadership hoped to prevent being aired at the annual party conference but unions have decided to force the issue with a "contemporary" resolution demanding action.
Controversial new rules passed by the party yesterday, aimed at ending embarrassing defeats for the leadership, mean that such resolutions will not be allowed after this year and this year's will not to go to a vote. The government is adamant that the flexibility provided by agency workers has been a vital part of Britain's economic success. But the T&G section of Unite the Union is still expected to open tomorrow's debate by saying that the plight of more than a million agency workers is "the single biggest issue facing the country today" and is causing serious racial tension.
The Guardian 24 September 2007What is the real economic impact of immigration?
Brown rejects cap on immigration recommended by peers
Labour is malignant, not incompetent
How ruthlessly is Britain prepared to battle with those who want a slice of its wealth?
Malicious, misguided, and badly misinformed
The Economic Impact of Immigration
BBC UK growth 'helped by immigration'
Ernst and Young ITEM club
Telegraph.co.uk
Higher figures for foreign workers undermine ministers' claims
The Economic and Fiscal Impact of Immigration
Olympic stadiums 'may need more migrants'
Relieving the pressure
Demography, race and class, New Labour and the BNP
Barking & Dagenham has recently become synonymous with the British National Party. The borough has hardly been out of the news. For two weeks before the local elections the media were crawling over the area writing articles foreboding BNP support. When this became a reality on 4 May the media were back in town, this time reflecting on the political earthquake that was largely of their own making. Jon Cruddas MP and Nick Lowles argue that only a readjustment in public policy can defeat the BNP. ...
The real trigger for BNP activity, and consequently votes and elected councillors, was the media frenzy following Margaret Hodge’s comments that eight out of ten of her white working-class voters supported the BNP, her view that in some sense the profile of Barking resembled that of Brixton and the statement that other London authorities were actively depositing asylum seekers into the borough. What followed was arguably the most sustained, and indeed often benign, media coverage of the BNP that we have seen. ...
The key driver of this transformation is the relatively low cost private housing market; yet this consequence of the right to buy has also heightened demand for social housing given sustained house price inflation over the past five years. The borough retains the lowest cost housing across the whole of London and as such it has a magnetic pull for anyone in search of such housing. ...
The major demographic changes are still off the radar of public policy makers who remain attached to census data that offer diminishing returns in terms of understanding the day-to-day realities of life in the borough.
The population changes have largely occurred since the last census. Yet public policy making assumes a stable – indeed slightly declining – population of 164,000 for allocating resources with a static ethnic make-up for every year since 2001.
The only data set that begins to uncover the demographic shifts of which every resident is aware is year-on-year data regarding school rolls. This shows up both a rapidly growing head count and dramatic shifts within that total.
For example, between 2003 and 2005 the percentage of white children on the school roll fell by some 9.1%. Three quarters of this change is accounted for by black African children.
One of the key factors behind the emergence of the BNP is this rupture between the formal state perception of the borough and the day-to-day dynamics at work within it.
The incremental state investment in public services on the basis of out of date population statistics cannot even begin to remove concerns that demographic change is occurring while resources are becoming more scarce.
Therefore, it is a short step to perceive that these changes are actually reducing the social wage, be this in terms of growing health inequalities, reduced access to social housing or even declining hourly wage rates as the dynamic of migration triggers a rush to the bottom in terms of conditions at work ...
Searchlight June 2006
No such thing as society
There can, surely, be no disputing the observation that present day global society is neither just nor equitable. It is, in fact quite spectacularly unjust and inequitable, and apparently becoming more so.
One of the central tasks of modern 'governance' is to keep this fact from reaching and lodging in the forefront of our minds. In this enterprise it is extraordinarily successful, and is also apparently becoming more so.
Distributed throughout developed, Western society there is, as Foucault put it, an apparatus of power now all but perfected in obscuring from the vast majority not only the extent of injustice and inequity globally, nationally and locally, but also the ways in which injustice and inequity cause suffering.
Somewhat idiosyncratically, I fear, I see it as the role of clinical psychology to work away at demystifying one small aspect of this apparatus: i.e., to try to explicate the link between malign societal influence and the subjective experience of distress. ...
As it has developed over the last hundred years, therapy has become one of the principal ways in which social injustice and inequity have managed to obscure their consequences.
For, at least by implication, therapy maintains that there is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families. Margaret Thatcher’s notorious dictum could well be adapted as its slogan. ...
So deeply imbued are we with the autonomous individualism of twentieth century psychology that to question its accuracy is to risk apostasy from intellectual and moral probity.
For it forms the heart not just of our approach to emotional distress, but is deeply rooted also in the wider culture: in literature, in art, in the almost unshakeable commonsense understanding of self that seems to underpin the experience of every one of us.
Do we not run our lives by assessing our situation and making choices? Is not our daily experience one of the almost continuous exercise of freedom? Is it not self-evident that the answer to psychological unease must in one form or another be one of self-adjustment? Surely such a view is the very antithesis of tyranny.
In fact, I think, this view is informed more by a magical wishfulness than it is by any sober assessment of our condition.
What seems common sense can I think better be understood as a highly misleading ideology that, though no doubt growing away quietly in previous centuries, has come to full bloom over the past hundred years and that, though it is most fiercely defended by those it most effectively enslaves, truly serves the interests only of those who profit most from the way our society is ordered.
In fact, I submit, we do not as ‘ordinary people’ to any significant extent choose the conditions of our existence, and when, as we often do, we find that they hurt us, our ability to change them is very strictly limited.
The apparent moral and epistemological autonomy that we mistakenly take as definitive of our very humanity helps to blind us, I think, to the societal factors which in fact very largely control our lives and our experience.
We are, if you like, held in place by a largely invisible tyranny. One of the few places the workings of this tyranny come to light (to the critical eye) is in the psychological clinic. ...
... not only do clients of therapy often expect to be treated as morally inferior, as a matter of fact they often are so treated. For a start, the whole therapeutic enterprise is built on an assumption of ‘abnormality’.
The patient’s conviction that ‘there is something the matter with me’ is unlikely to be questioned by anybody he or she encounters in the clinic. But beyond this, the feelings patients often express, once they’ve spilled their beans, that ‘I know it’s me’, ‘I know nobody can do it but myself’, etc., reflect perfectly accurately the common therapeutic view that ‘responsibility’ for their cure lies in their own hands.
Because, after all, they are free agents ...
Power is generated within and through social institutions.
The institutions of power operate independently of particular individuals and at varying distances from them, affecting them via almost unimaginably complex lines of influence that travel through individuals as well as through other institutions.
The further away from the individual person a particular social institution is, the more powerful it is likely to be and the more individuals it will affect.
For example, the machinery of global capitalism has enormous effects on vast numbers of people in the world who are themselves in no position to be able to see into its operation. ...
I suggest that an individual might ... be defined as an embodied locus in social space-time through which power flows.
People are held in place within the social environment by the influences which structure it, and their freedom to change position or influence people and events is strictly limited by the availability of power within the sub-systems in which they are located.
In fact, no significant amount power is available to the individual beyond that which is afforded by the social environment either now or in the past. ...
Power does not originate within the individuals, nor even—to any significant extent—within the institutions shown (e.g. work, school), but is generated much more distally within and between socio-economic and cultural systems whose all-pervasive influence defies intricate analysis.
What, then, of our sense of agency?
Am I not putting forward here a determinist view that has all sorts of depressing implications for freedom and the independence of the human spirit, etc.? There are just two points I want to make about this.
The first is that I am not denying freedom, but I am suggesting that we are free to do only that which we have the power to do. Much of the time we have very little idea about what is in our power to do and what isn’t, and in this regard therapy and counselling are not only particularly deficient, but downright misleading and oppressive.
The second point is that much of our sense of agency follows necessarily from our nature as embodied creatures. As social powers and influences flow through us, we have an irresistible feeling of their originating within us, because that is all we could feel. We attribute all kinds of significance to our feelings in this respect, and to account for what we feel ourselves doing, we invent a language of autonomy and responsibility that does not in fact stand up to critical examination and analysis. If we want to understand what we are up to and why we suffer, we are going to have to pay far more attention than we have in the past century to the structure and dynamics of social space-time.
The Moral Tyrannies of Therapy David Smail