Thread: The U.K and the E.U - In or out?

Originally Posted by PAG

Interesting post from elsewhere I just read:

"The EU has given us cheap mobile phone roaming charges, cheaper flights and proper compensation when things go wrong. It has helped clean up the environment, improving our rivers and beaches. It has given us unprecedented freedom to travel visa-free across the continent. And I’m voting out.
Why? I know a painter/decorator who has not been able to raise his wages for 15 years. There’s always someone else, he says, willing to work for less. A driver who arrived from Turkey 18 years ago, who says the bus companies used to pay more than £12 an hour, but can now pay £10 or less because they have so many takers (and yes, the irony is noted). A care-home cleaner in a rundown seaside town who reckons her hopes of ever getting more than the minimum wage are zero. Each blames an influx of workers from the EU. Each of them are voting out. Tell them the EU protects workers’ rights and they just laugh.

When companies launch recruitment drives in eastern Europe they blame skills shortages in Britain. Really? If a big business wants to hire, say, drivers on £25 an hour, it will find it can do so easily; what they really mean is that they can’t find people willing to work for £10 an hour or less, with antisocial hours to boot. Meanwhile, workers here rejecting low wages are told they are lazy, chavvy and feckless when they refuse to be part of the so-called “jobs factory of Europe”."

My BIL has worked for the same civil Engineering company for 30 years , he is now the only British Employee, the other 60 or so are all from Eastern Europe all with short term work contracts .

Originally Posted by piwanoi

Originally Posted by PAG

Interesting post from elsewhere I just read:

"The EU has given us cheap mobile phone roaming charges, cheaper flights and proper compensation when things go wrong. It has helped clean up the environment, improving our rivers and beaches. It has given us unprecedented freedom to travel visa-free across the continent. And I’m voting out.
Why? I know a painter/decorator who has not been able to raise his wages for 15 years. There’s always someone else, he says, willing to work for less. A driver who arrived from Turkey 18 years ago, who says the bus companies used to pay more than £12 an hour, but can now pay £10 or less because they have so many takers (and yes, the irony is noted). A care-home cleaner in a rundown seaside town who reckons her hopes of ever getting more than the minimum wage are zero. Each blames an influx of workers from the EU. Each of them are voting out. Tell them the EU protects workers’ rights and they just laugh.

When companies launch recruitment drives in eastern Europe they blame skills shortages in Britain. Really? If a big business wants to hire, say, drivers on £25 an hour, it will find it can do so easily; what they really mean is that they can’t find people willing to work for £10 an hour or less, with antisocial hours to boot. Meanwhile, workers here rejecting low wages are told they are lazy, chavvy and feckless when they refuse to be part of the so-called “jobs factory of Europe”."

My BIL has worked for the same civil Engineering company for 30 years , he is now the only British Employee, the other 60 or so are all from Eastern Europe all with short term work contracts .

That's because we do not have enough skilled persons. Have you ever heard the word economics?