A problem first noticed in the other place has resurfaced (see reference 1).
The story, triggered by a tale from a midlands sandwich factory, a place which makes a lot of the sandwiches which you might buy from the likes of M&S, is about benefit spongers from a place I shall call Rurimania, a vaguely central european country which includes lots of very dodgy people amongst its population. Certainly gyppoes, possibly vampires.
It seems that the salary of a brain surgeon in Rurimania is less than the minimum wage in this country. Furthermore, Rurimania is so poor that even brain surgeons have to live in shared bed-sits. Which means that they are quite happy to come here, to work at our minimum wage on our zero hours contracts and to live in our sort of shared bed-sits, or perhaps in clapped-out caravans round the back of the shed, while they work out how to get back onto the medical ladder. While our young people are too proud and too lazy: they are not going to get up early in the morning for minimum wages on zero hours contracts; they would rather scrape by on benefit, possibly supplemented by a little drug dealing on the side.
Some people think that this ought to be stopped, with one angle on enforcement (in today's DT) being to take our hard pressed police off drugs duties and to put them on foreigner registration duties. Maybe even legalise drugs to free up even more resources. Then wages would have to drift up to the point where our lads and lasses would take the jobs on offer and all would be rosy in the garden.
Another take on this, also from the DT, is that foreigners who are in work in this country are eligible for in-work benefits, without regard to how long they have been in the country. So a foreigner on minimum wages with ten children to support can claim all kinds of benefits to top up his minimum wages. The employers are getting away with minimum wages, which are often not enough to live any kind of a decent life on, because government is picking up the tab.
So going back to the sandwich factory, said to be more or less entirely staffed by Rurimanians, the boss makes lots of dosh and we get our sandwiches for less than we ought to, making up the difference in general taxation, which the boss does not pay because he has come to a cosy arrangement with those nice people in the Channel Islands.
I ought perhaps to make it clear that I am all for foreigners. We have a young people deficit here while the Rurimanias have a young people exicit, so it makes sense for them to move from there to here, a move which also helps to even up incomes & wealth across the two populations, a good thing in the long run. I only feel a touch guilty about all the Rurimanians who stay at home and who need some brain surgery.
But maybe we should stop subsidising minimum wage operators through the benefit system and start paying a more realistic price for our sandwiches. Push the minimum wage up to a living wage. Or even make our own sandwiches.
Another wheeze which I am attracted to is to make it socially unacceptable, in the way that drink driving has become socially unacceptable, for a person at the top of a workplace to earn more than five times the person at the bottom. I leave the details, which need to take account of things like office cleaning sub-contractors, share options, bonuses, part timers and other lead-swingers, as an exercise for readers.
PS: I learn later that the sandwich factory story is not very true. But I don't think that takes the moral away from my tale as I believe there to be lots of work places which are like the one in the story.
Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=benefightus+spongiferus.
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