Both the US and Apartheid South Africa demonstrate that the economic conditions of a country are largely detached from immigration/demographics. In right-wing UK circles, I see a lot of "cope" around the plans of Reform/Restore, in which the major factor for productivity collapse is entirely low skilled immigration, and once they are kicked out companies will be forced to pay much higher wages. It's an oddly left-wing viewpoint, one in which greedy companies are keeping all the money for themselves, and you just have to force them in order to get that money to the wider public.
The argument, as expressed by Mark Carney below*, is that cheap labour functions as a good enough solution that doesn't force companies to become more productive and thus able to raise wages for those they do hire (and doesn't force the government to figure out how to create incentives towards this end). Why bother?
I don't know that this is particularly "leftist". It's about as stereotypically leftist as claiming that companies faced with higher goods prices they can't pass on will either shrink the item or stop selling it. The left wing answer (that we saw post-COVID/stimulus) would be to deny that the business' options are limited this way in the first place, and that the companies are using it as an excuse to be greedy.
It can totally be the rational decision for UK employers until something changes without it being pure greed.
*
Yes, that's absolutely right. There can be short-term, and you're familiar with it.... Mr. Macklem was just in Fort McMurray, and I'm from the area as well, so we're familiar with the kinds of gaps you get there. One doesn't want an over-reliance, certainly, on temporary foreign workers for lower-skilled jobs, which prevent the wage adjustment mechanism from making sure that Canadians are paid higher wages, but also so that firms improve their productivity as necessary. We don't want to mask it, and the intent of the government's review is to ensure that this is used for transition, for those higher-skilled gaps that exist and can hold our economy back.
I think the spirit of the program and the spirit of the government's review is to ensure that this program is concentrated on higher skills, number one, to fill gaps, and to recognize that those are temporary gaps, so that we are ensuring that Canadian businesses are providing Canadian solutions—the training—and that we're working together to ensure that Canadians can meet those gaps. For the lower-wage jobs, it is important over a reasonable time period to ensure that the market adjusts and that those market wages adjust; then there will be productivity and other adjustments that ensure that Canadians are paid more, but also that we're a more productive economy as a whole. Getting that balance right is what is necessary.
Tanista
25d ago
It's funny because, arguably, the winning left-wing critique is that Israelis act like Middle-Easterners, which is unacceptable for a Western nation.
Tanista
27d ago
the PLO are not as willing to die as Hamas.
That's a problem too. It allows the more radical element to drive things.
Almost certainly just a conflation of the revisionist fascist states of WW2 with ethnostates in general to better discredit the latter. At least, that's always been the purpose this criticism has served when I run into it.
Which is why the murderous and expansionist nature of the Soviets doesn't discredit propositional nations, nor is the theory debunked by the also-common criticism of the empires in WW1.
Is it? Looks like authoritarian multiculturalism with none of the redeeming qualities Singapore has.
Really? I suppose you can say this about Blair's changes but they legitimately seem to have sleepwalked into fiscal issues like the triple lock. Which sounds insane but if it was just expected that you could do nothing about the elderly's benefits Labour wouldn't have been forced into humiliating retreats on something much less essential like the winter fuel allowance. They would have just let the train run.
Like many people they just promised more than they could deliver.
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