Rjan:
GasGas:
Even the poorest members of the EU now have car factories producing extremely good vehicles and parts - all they’re doing is competing with the richer members on workers’ wages.
That will happen whether we are in the EU or out. The trick for an advanced economy like the UK is to keep hold of the high-value work like R&D, and put the assembly work (which is increasingly automated anyway) in a location with competitive wages and close to the market.
Then you’re declaring war on workers in Britain in routine and manual occupations, and now you know why they’re voting Brexit and turning to the far-right, if your views are typical of Remainers.
The reality is that in a properly functioning society, you have people capable of (and suited to) doing all kinds of work, because all kinds of work actually need to be done.
It’s a mistake to imagine we are (or even will be) the permanent brainbox of the world economy, or that every single person will be a scientist. Even if we wanted that, a good place to start isn’t by kids growing up with empty bellies and parents whose intellectual labour is spent wrestling with benefits bureaucracy because their wages are too low, or moving house every 6 months when the landlord wants to put up the rent to unaffordable levels, or whose jobs are deskilled to mindless repetition, or by university graduates preparing sandwiches whilst bosses cut back on training and instead poach skills from abroad.
Other societies are perfectly capable in the long run of developing their own R&D expertise, and will do. And there are already other societies equal to our own perfectly capable of R&D, so we do not have a monopoly on that even now.
And then where will we be, once distant societies produce their own R&D workers? No experience of manufacturing, no factories or plant, and the R&D market will itself be as low wage as the lowest wage economy (which could be a highly authoritarian one).
At any rate, this is all besides the point. In practice our toilets and desks at work do not clean themselves. Our delivery vehicles do not drive themselves. Our farm animals do not shepherd and slaughter themselves and ride an automatic conveyor onto shop shelves. Our meals do not cook themselves. These things cannot be done in faraway lands - or at least some of them that can be done far away, cannot be done very efficiently.
The problem is that the people who actually do this work, and are still very much integral to our economy, are not being paid their just deserts or enough to live, whilst bosses and financiers sit back on jetplanes and yachts.
Example: I’ve just ridden a rather nice brand new Royal Enfield Interceptor 650 motorcycle. It was mostly engineered in the UK, and built in India. Triumphs equally are engineered in the UK and mostly assembled in Thailand.
Indeed, but what happens when India and Thailand decide to engineer their own, and have the workers accustomed to building them to boot? We still have people here who did (and do) the actual physical work - you can’t just design a block of metal abstractly on a CAD computer program and expect it to be fabricated, you actually need to have contact with people who know how a foundry works and the challenges and constraints such metalwork involves on account of how designs are actually put into practice. The people who have some experience of doing the manufacturing will actually then be the most productive designers and researchers.
Moreover, what happens when the rest of the world are the only people capable of building things? They aren’t going to keep paying premium prices for an elite class of R&D and design workers in Britain whilst they do the physical production for a pittance.
They’ll just embargo the physical goods until you’re paying the foreign manufacturing workers, who are the only ones with the experience and knowledge of it, more than the designers here, because the supply of physical goods are needed immediately and constantly, and they can continue to build according to existing designs and processes they already possess and using existing plant, whereas future designs are not needed immediately and they are completely useless to any human purpose unless they are actually built.
I’d agree with much of that, but it’s only a part of the picture. I grew up in a village in a farming community. There were four farms, each of which employed four or five workers and housed their families, and there was seasonal work at harvest time for older children, too.
Guess what?
There is now just one farm. It sometimes employs specialist contractors, but most of the work is done by one woman (her late Dad owned the largest of the farms and took the others over, financing his acquisitions by flogging bits of the original farm off for housing) with a huge tractor and a specialist loader.
If you turned the clock back, would the great-grandchildren of those men who ‘followed the plough’ want to go back to the old way of life? Starvation wages, tied cottages with no bathroom, punishing physical work outside in all weathers? No way!
They’ve all found jobs doing other things in other industries or professions: ranging from working in the petrochemicals sector to bending old supermarket trollies back into shape. Or are choosing to claim the dole and watch daytime TV. No matter. None of them are going to get up at 4 am to milk cows for (an inflation-adjusted) four bob a week.
There are whole British industries now doing stuff that we could not have comprehended back in the 1960s; designing chips for mobile phones, creating computer games and servicing turbines on windfarms. And there are whole sectors of even white-collar employment that hardly exist any more. When I first went to work in an office in the 1980s, there was still a ‘secretarial pool’ of women typing up letters for people and putting them in the post. All gone now. And there’s more to go. Accountancy looks particularly vulnerable to mechanisation at the moment.
And, if you think that Brexit will be any good for the average working person in the UK, can I suggest that you read the Brexiteers’ Bible: “Britannia Unchained”. It’s the honest prospectus for Brexit, written by four Conservative MPs who are now driving the process. They want the checks and balances that the EU provides in the employer/employee relationship gone. They want a return to a master-servant relationship, with a few exploiting as many as they need and ignoring the rest.
Here’s a typical quote for you: "The British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music."
Which is interesting…and insulting…and it ignores that both football and pop music are now huge earners, employers, and exporters for UK plc.
The one thing that we can be certain about the future is that it won’t be much like the past. And the ‘Daily Express’ Brexit projection of going back to a land of 1950s contentment and ‘One Nation’ Conservatism that never really existed is a complete fiction.
so eventually they killed the goose. Those who bought/held on to their shares probably did well. If they’ve been working for decades and getting paid this much and didn’t have enough savings to get themselves through training for another occupation and last a few weeks/months between jobs, then I have 0 sympathy for them.
