Home Secretary announces points-based immigration system

[JagLover]

rxe said:

I suspect we've got quite the opposite problem - a looming surfeit of low skilled workers.

.....and people highly skilled in trades that no longer require workers.

[nikaiyo2]

When I was at college 1999-2000 ish I worked in a salad packing factory, the work was awful, boring and in a giant fridge. I am sure we got £9PH and £12.00PH after midnight.
The same place was advertising for staff a few months back, the wages were LOWER than when I worked there.

[deadslow]

JagLover said:

rxe said:

Hang on.

One group of doom mongers say that automation will cause massive problems for low skilled people.
Another group of doom mongers say that we need more low skilled people because we have no automation.

Which of the doom mongers is correct?

Actually what will happen is something in between. It will be hard to find minimum wage people. Some employers will have to pay more - and then the government can pay less. Others will automate.

The old option of "we're going to chuck bodies at it, and let the government top up the wages" won't work any more. This is a good thing.

What I find interesting is this conviction you cannot automate low skilled work, or at least a proportion of it.

If you go a supermarket and use a self service till you are using an automated service that ten years ago would have been done by Doris on the till. If you go to MacDonald's and use a touchscreen to order then the same. not every job can be automated but enough can to finally see some productivity growth again.

Edited by JagLover on Wednesday 19th February 13:52

the difficulty seems to arise when (hundreds of) thousands of us need to take every morning off work to check granny has taken her meds, got fed, and been to the loo, since there will be a catastrophic shortage in the care sector.

[Condi]

rxe said:

Indeed. A farmer in 1800 would be adamant what wheat harvesting was manual, you needed people with scythes and manual threshers. What a combine harvester does is actually impossible.

Retail is being automated out of existence. It's not just the checkouts, its the fact that we don't need physical buildings with stuff in them, and hordes of low skilled people to loiter about.

Banking is being automated out of existence. I last needed a branch .... er .... 5 years ago?

Some surprising professions are being automated - I sure as hell wouldn't train as a radiologist today. Computers are much better than people at pattern matching, in a decade the Chinese will be cranking out modalities that do the diagnosis as well as take the picture.

Elderly care - use automation to actually target people who really need help, rather than checking everyone. No point in building the systems when you can get a bunch of min wage Poles to do it.

If you believe the bullst coming out of the motor industry, the career of "driving people and stuff around" will be over in a decade.

I suspect we've got quite the opposite problem - a looming surfeit of low skilled workers.

And yet Japan, the most advanced country in the world with regards to robotics and automation, still has huge problems due to an aging population and declining labour force. If they can't do it, having had years to adapt, then what makes you think we can bring in large changes in a few years?

Many of the lower skilled jobs will go abroad - the fish will be landed or taken to France, salad and fruit farms will shut and we'll import in from Europe, UK meat producers will get less money because more of the final price will be spent on paying slaughtermen, and expect to pay more for your pint if pubs have to pay staff an extra £2ph.

Over time industry will no doubt adapt, invest and innovate, but in the shorter period many of the companies will go abroad and it'll be hard to attract them back.

[Mrr T]

rxe said:

Elderly care - use automation to actually target people who really need help, rather than checking everyone. No point in building the systems when you can get a bunch of min wage Poles to do it.

Machines to monitor a person's condition are expensive and invasive. Fine in hospital but not practical in a care home. They also need to be checked incase someone removes a monitor and if they go off. How about food and medicine. Some sort of giant catapult firing them at the patient? Some sort of automated washing machine to clean them up? An automated bed making machine?

[CzechItOut]

deadslow said:

the difficulty seems to arise when (hundreds of) thousands of us need to take every morning off work to check granny has taken her meds, got fed, and been to the loo, since there will be a catastrophic shortage in the care sector.

That's the point though. The millions who lose their retail, food service and warehousing jobs to automation will be available to do the jobs which require human-intervention, such as care work.

[rxe]

Mrr T said:

Machines to monitor a person's condition are expensive and invasive. Fine in hospital but not practical in a care home. They also need to be checked incase someone removes a monitor and if they go off. How about food and medicine. Some sort of giant catapult firing them at the patient? Some sort of automated washing machine to clean them up? An automated bed making machine?

However machines to monitor a persons activity (have they got up, have they taken their medicine, have they fallen over, has their gait changed) are cheap and easily doable. If you're not familiar with the technology, you'll be amazed at what can be done in terms of image recognition and pattern matching with machine learning.

Simple example - you have 100 elderly people in sheltered accommodation. The old model is to send someone in to physically check each person, and you needed to do it quickly to get through all of them to catch the ones who hadn't got up etc - so you needed several people to do the checking. With a moderate amount of technology, you know which individual hasn't got up, and you know to check them first. You know who hasn't taken their pills, so you can avoid them blacking out and falling over. You know who used to walk well, but something has changed in the last week, and they're now walking badly.

No, technology is unlikely to make beds and wipe arses, but it will reduce the amount of arse-wiping and checking needed.

[Stussy]

milkround said:

Don't believe any of this for a single second.

The number of Eastern European forklift drivers, HGV drivers and warehouse pickers is astronomical. And generally they arrive and leave in cycles. Without them we would have to start paying wages which makes the natives want to do these jobs. Which isn't going to happen.

A workaround will be found. And it will be business as usual. I'd wager to get and keep staff without being able to flood the market with labour from Poland, Romania etc means you'd have to increase wages significantly. Which just isn't going to happen.

I worked as a supervisor in a warehouse for 23 years, when I first started there every single person was full time staff, was British, and we had annual pay reviews.
By the time I left, 80% or more were now foreign (mostly Polish) agency workers. For the remaining full time staff, a pay review every 3 or 4 years if you are lucky, and then it would be something useless like 10p an hour.
The agency staff were all happy to work every hour of the day, most would have lived there if they could, and were happy to do it for a crap wage.
They were also not shy in telling you that all of their wages were either being saved or sent home so they could buy a decent house back home and retire early.

It totally ruined what was an excellent friendly working environment and group of long serving loyal staff, to an anonymous bunch of people who had no dedication.
They knew if they were let go the agency would have them in another job the next day.
Also, the theft level went from zero to through the roof.

I once had a chat with one of the agency managers, asking why they sent us totally useless staff. They were required to understand complex loading manifests and procedures, yet most turned up and couldn’t even write their address!
His answer was that he was simply asked to supply X amount of heads per day, and that’s what he did. How useless they were he couldn’t care about.

nikaiyo2 said:

When I was at college 1999-2000 ish I worked in a salad packing factory, the work was awful, boring and in a giant fridge. I am sure we got £9PH and £12.00PH after midnight.
The same place was advertising for staff a few months back, the wages were LOWER than when I worked there.

The same for me too, I was earning more in the late 90s than when I left last year, doing the same job

Edited by Stussy on Wednesday 19th February 15:21

[deadslow]

CzechItOut said:

deadslow said:

the difficulty seems to arise when (hundreds of) thousands of us need to take every morning off work to check granny has taken her meds, got fed, and been to the loo, since there will be a catastrophic shortage in the care sector.

That's the point though. The millions who lose their retail, food service and warehousing jobs to automation will be available to do the jobs which require human-intervention, such as care work.

You don't seem to understand the qualities needed to be a carer. Your average shelf-packer has neither the skills nor the inclination to undertake this work.

[CambsBill]

Well folks, get ready to pay more for your fruit & veg.

In this neck of the woods we're crawling with fruit & veg packhouses, every one of them reliant on (mostly) Eastern European labour. The one I used to work for totted up the nationalities a few years ago - the answer was 26! (not all E. Europeans obviously). The local population were few & far between and certainly weren't in the high performers. If the Eastern Europeans get squeezed out of the market, then the options will be find another source of cheap, productive workers, pay more or automate more. The first is unlikely, the second will be inflationary and the third if done on a large scale will result in less income for HMRC (more deductions for capital allowances exacerbated by lower NI/PAYE payments).

It's true that a proportion of the 3 million EU citizens who have registered to stay in the UK are in that industry, but many have used it as a stepping stone to better things so a regular intake has always been needed.

[s1962a]

deadslow said:

CzechItOut said:

deadslow said:

the difficulty seems to arise when (hundreds of) thousands of us need to take every morning off work to check granny has taken her meds, got fed, and been to the loo, since there will be a catastrophic shortage in the care sector.

That's the point though. The millions who lose their retail, food service and warehousing jobs to automation will be available to do the jobs which require human-intervention, such as care work.

You don't seem to understand the qualities needed to be a carer. Your average shelf-packer has neither the skills nor the inclination to undertake this work.

When it pays £30ph they might be inclined to learn and be good at it. You and I, and every other taxpayer will obviously pick up the tab for the pay increase.

[JagLover]

CambsBill said:

The first is unlikely, the second will be inflationary and the third if done on a large scale will result in less income for HMRC (more deductions for capital allowances exacerbated by lower NI/PAYE payments).
.

How much Tax and NI do you think people on minimum wage are paying?. Also not factoring in that many on low incomes are entitled to sizeable amounts in inwork benefits.

[anonymous-user]

deadslow said:

CzechItOut said:

deadslow said:

the difficulty seems to arise when (hundreds of) thousands of us need to take every morning off work to check granny has taken her meds, got fed, and been to the loo, since there will be a catastrophic shortage in the care sector.

That's the point though. The millions who lose their retail, food service and warehousing jobs to automation will be available to do the jobs which require human-intervention, such as care work.

You don't seem to understand the qualities needed to be a carer. Your average shelf-packer has neither the skills nor the inclination to undertake this work.

It’s like when Thatcher or Callaghan or Wilson closed the mines and other industry down and was surprised people didn’t all move to london to work in financial services.

By the time we’re down to that many jobs being automated, we’ll likely be on the way to some kind of new form of economy anyway with a universal basic income.

[deadslow]

s1962a said:

deadslow said:

CzechItOut said:

deadslow said:

the difficulty seems to arise when (hundreds of) thousands of us need to take every morning off work to check granny has taken her meds, got fed, and been to the loo, since there will be a catastrophic shortage in the care sector.

That's the point though. The millions who lose their retail, food service and warehousing jobs to automation will be available to do the jobs which require human-intervention, such as care work.

You don't seem to understand the qualities needed to be a carer. Your average shelf-packer has neither the skills nor the inclination to undertake this work.

When it pays £30ph they might be inclined to learn and be good at it. You and I, and every other taxpayer will obviously pick up the tab for the pay increase.

In my old age I would dread being looked after by a person only doing it for the money. It ought to be better paid, but you need a special type of person to do it properly.

[Mrr T]

JagLover said:

CambsBill said:

The first is unlikely, the second will be inflationary and the third if done on a large scale will result in less income for HMRC (more deductions for capital allowances exacerbated by lower NI/PAYE payments).
.

How much Tax and NI do you think people on minimum wage are paying?. Also not factoring in that many on low incomes are entitled to sizeable amounts in inwork benefits.

Immigrants working on farms and in care home tend not to have children so in work benefits will be minimal.

[CambsBill]

JagLover said:

CambsBill said:

The first is unlikely, the second will be inflationary and the third if done on a large scale will result in less income for HMRC (more deductions for capital allowances exacerbated by lower NI/PAYE payments).
.

How much Tax and NI do you think people on minimum wage are paying?. Also not factoring in that many on low incomes are entitled to sizeable amounts in inwork benefits.

All our staff were certainly paying some of both, so the compound effect has the potential to be a big number. Benefits I won't comment on simply because I don't know what the stats are.

[crankedup]

deadslow said:

JagLover said:

rxe said:

Hang on.

One group of doom mongers say that automation will cause massive problems for low skilled people.
Another group of doom mongers say that we need more low skilled people because we have no automation.

Which of the doom mongers is correct?

Actually what will happen is something in between. It will be hard to find minimum wage people. Some employers will have to pay more - and then the government can pay less. Others will automate.

The old option of "we're going to chuck bodies at it, and let the government top up the wages" won't work any more. This is a good thing.

What I find interesting is this conviction you cannot automate low skilled work, or at least a proportion of it.

If you go a supermarket and use a self service till you are using an automated service that ten years ago would have been done by Doris on the till. If you go to MacDonald's and use a touchscreen to order then the same. not every job can be automated but enough can to finally see some productivity growth again.

Edited by JagLover on Wednesday 19th February 13:52

the difficulty seems to arise when (hundreds of) thousands of us need to take every morning off work to check granny has taken her meds, got fed, and been to the loo, since there will be a catastrophic shortage in the care sector.

Changes in how we organise work - flextime has been around a couple of decades for example.

[Condi]

Mrr T said:

JagLover said:

How much Tax and NI do you think people on minimum wage are paying?. Also not factoring in that many on low incomes are entitled to sizeable amounts in inwork benefits.

Immigrants working on farms and in care home tend not to have children so in work benefits will be minimal.

Indeed. I've worked with quite a few eastern Europeans who used to come here for the summer, work their arses off on farms and in factories, then go back home for winter. I doubt many, if any, claimed any in work benefits, even if they were entitled to, although they all paid income tax and national insurance, their employer paid employers NI, they spent money in the UK, paying VAT, and then their company paid corporation tax on the profit they make from the labour.

To suggest that there isn't going to be knock to the treasury is nonsense, especially if having got rid of all these low paid migrants, we then replace them with a load of highly educated care home staff all on £40k a year paid for by the taxpayer...

[Oakey]

nikaiyo2 said:

When I was at college 1999-2000 ish I worked in a salad packing factory, the work was awful, boring and in a giant fridge. I am sure we got £9PH and £12.00PH after midnight.
The same place was advertising for staff a few months back, the wages were LOWER than when I worked there.

It's no mystery, your hourly age was probably a hangover from prior to the introduction of minimum wage. In due course they rectified the 'problem'

[crankedup]

Jimboka said:

As it’s a level playing field for the whole wide world (maybe), then the seasonal or lower paid jobs will presumably be filled by the lower skilled from other poor countries in the world. Not just typically Eastern European.
I wonder if the average brexit voter realised that hard working migrant labour will always be needed.
Just opened it up to other sources of ‘cheap’ labour.
Assuming that the lazy Brits don’t get off their backsides of course!

Nope, the salary baseline is to high to support cheap labour coming into the U.K.
We need to fast track innovations into robotics in agriculture and soft fruits, that’s currently ongoing in development. Never though a machine could crop strawberries without damaging the product? it’s almost ready for market.
Lazy brits are no longer to be supported on welfare, hence our one payment system in development and use. Seek work or reduction in welfare cheque.
The U.K. has to be weaned off the cheap labour mantra that has the Country being so distorted in Social and wealth terms.
.