SINGLE USE SERFS
Very odd timing for the Immigration Bill to pass through Parliament today 18th of May. At the time of writing this there is no news regarding its fate. But here is what it has in store:
“The government announced proposals for the new system, suggesting points will be awarded for being able to speak English to a certain standard, having a job offer from an approved employer, and meeting a salary threshold of £25,600. “
Ms Patel said the changes in the bill “will play a vital role in our recovery plans for the future”.
“It will end free movement and pave the way for a firmer, fairer and simpler system and will attract people we need to drive our country through the recovery stage of coronavirus, laying the foundation of a high wage, high skill productive economy,” she said.”
“Laying the foundation for a high wage, high skilled economy”. No joke, Priti? Have you been on the same planet as us for the past few months? The economy at the minute is desperate for so called low skilled workers. On the high wage issue: days ago leaks published in the Telegraph talk about government’s plan to rain heartless brutal pay freezes on those most avidly fighting for us on the frontline of this pandemic.
“High skilled”? Last month, British farmers had to literally fly in Romanian fruit pickers to rescue this year’s crops and feed people… they didn’t need to fly in “high skilled” bankers. If there is one thing this pandemic has made glaringly obvious is how much the whole economy and even our lives rely on the hard and unrewarded labour of these so called “unskilled” workers. Often immigrants, always invisible. They are the silent suffering engine that power British life.
Yet this bill is ending Freedom of Movement and making it very hard for so called low skilled workers to come over unless they fulfil the 70 points required in the bill, of which earning over £25,600 is key. I’d like to see how you pick your own fruit and what happens to prices in supermarkets if you start paying pickers that wage. This raises a lot of interesting points about the future of British economy: maybe I am just being short-sighted and Priti just wants to raise everyone’ levels and eradicate the monstrous exploitation innate to Western economy? But until they do that, and solve the injustices of this global economy, there is no way that British people will be able to afford food produced in an agriculture that pays its workers a decent wage. Perhaps she should work on that. Perhaps they have different designs us peasants aren’t meant to know.
Because let’s be honest, this cycle of abuse is repeated worldwide. Romania is mostly known as a supplier of cheap desperate labour who will do the back breaking work British people won’t, while paying for bed and board out of their already below market wages. While back home, the Romanian government has had to sign a deal to ship in 500,000 workers from Pakistan to supplant the labour force we lost to the West. Those even more desperate workers, of course, prepared to accept even lower wages than Romanian workers do in the West.
It’s a sick global economy predicated on trampling on workers’ dignity and this bill is doing nothing but paying lip service to the increasingly xenophobic attitudes in the country that see Eastern Europeans as the source of the problem.
People hypocritically banging pots and pans every night at 8pm in gratitude to low skilled front line workers… yet this government is thinking, you know what? What we really need right now is less of these poor “low skilled workers”, like agricultural workers, drivers, shop workers, carers; we need more of those nice middle class service workers who can sit around watching Netflix through a pandemic while being furloughed at 80% of that minimum £25,600 per annum salary — i.e., getting more to stay home than frontline workers get risking their lives.
