The shackles of the EU was one of the main moans of the Brexiteers but it now turns out they had control of low wage policies within the EU.
Why leave then? Was it to pursue higher wage policies for workers or even lower than what they got away with whilst in the EU.
Weak argument from you EV surprisingly. The Guardian article today I thought was very accurate in describing where the UK is now at. Still divided and Brexit hasn't hurt enough yet to sway leavers. The bit about the Labour party was also very true imho. They are caught between a rock and hard place unable to make much mileage out of the failings of Brexit because the electorate are still split 50/50 or thereabouts. Time will tell but I think it is only a matter of time. Will be interesting to see what course comes from it.
I have posted about this before. Wages for lots of work types in the UK are often much lower than Ireland. I was shocked at some of the stuff I came across. The city banking jobs would be an exception. I always thought the salary levels in that sector are obscene.
Brexit was all about preventing further integration and central control which might have squeezed that excess and tackled the massive tax avoidance.
As has been stated many times the working class Tories in England voted to save the bankers and traders. Well done them not.
Enfield Boy linked to a UK Gov Web page which shows that HMRC has investigated, named, prosecuted and fined 191 companies which contravened UK minimum wage laws.
The enforcement of these rules is surely a good thing, and whilst I can't see it as having anything to do with the EU, it does at the very least illustrate that scare stories about the government reducing 'workers rights' post brexit were built on nothing more than speculative scaremongering.
Mystic Meg then quoted some figures which purport to show that the UK is a unique repository of cheap, unskilled imported labour, as if that were somehow an advertisement for remaining in the EU. In response I pointed out that exploitation of cheap imported labour is far from unique to the UK, and that it is the norm in the EU, which is posited by the remainer left as a haven of 'workers rights'.
Both posters seem to miss the glaringly obvious fact that it is the EU freedom of movement of labour rules - one of the oft quoted dogmas which sits at the heart of the EU project - which has permitted UK firms to exploit cheap imported labour, most particularly since the accession of the Eastern States and Blair's waiving of the 8 year EU moratorium on opening the UK to immigration from those countries. This has been a major factor in the UK's lamentable record of investment and productivity, something which might potentially be addressed by Brexit and the stricter rules on unskilled immigration.
Neither Enfield Boy's nor Mystic Meg's posts are an advertisement for the advantages of EU membership, or the disadvantages of Brexit.
The EU is in truth very far from the shining beacon of virtuosity touted by the former pro-remain camp regard of workers' rights. In fact workers rights in the EU are largely a case of EC smoke and mirrors, artful presentation rather than meaningful substance. The EU is at root and core a neoliberal organisation, and it routinely favours capital over labour both within the Treaties and ECJ case law, and in its response to (often self-inflicted) crises, such as that which threatened EMU a decade ago.
Successive EU Treaties have enshrined the right of the establishment (business) to establish an enterprise, offer services, move capital, and move labour, to wherever they wish in the EU, and ECJ case law has suppressed the rights of workers to object to it (see Viking Line and Laval, 2007). Free movement of people is not about the right of people to go on holiday, or buy a house in France, it is about the arbitrage of labour, the right of businesses to drive down costs by relocating to where cost are lower, or by importing cheaper workers from poorer locations.
Try talking about 'workers rights' to Ukrainian workers in German meat processing factories, or to Greek, Italian and Spanish labourers whose jobs were sacrificed to save the French and German banks in the Euro crisis. It would be interesting to hear what they would have to say.
