Another regular complaint – particularly from the left – is that freedom of movement is a tool of the neo-liberal right, to shunt workers around the world at a whim. In practice, this is the reverse of the truth. Removing freedom of movement will give the multinationals more power – the freedom of movement transferred their power to workers. This may seem counterintuitive. It needs to be thought through. What freedom of movement, in its EU form, does is give the individual worker the right to live and work in any of the member states. They don’t need a work visa, they don’t need a job offer, they don’t need to go through any special bureaucracy – just the ‘right to work’ checks that people will be familiar with when they apply for any job in the UK now. Show your passport or similar form of ID. That’s putting power in the hands of the worker.
‘But it helps undercut wages and takes our jobs’. No, it really doesn’t. The evidence suggests that in the past it has been mainly beneficial to wages, except at the very lowest end – and this latter effect (described as infinitesimal by the author of the one report often cited by Leavers) is in itself very misleading.
Freedom of movement is a reciprocal right – people seem to tend to forget that it’s not just about people coming to the UK but about UK people being able to live, work, love, marry and more in the rest of the EU. It’s a positive thing. It’s a freedom. By removing it we’re making ourselves less free. We’re taking something away from ourselves. We’re narrowing rather than broadening our horizons – and all for either a misunderstanding of the concept or a misinterpretation of the evidence – or worse, from xenophobia.
https://paulbernal.wordpress.com/2018/11/23/a-few-words-on-freedom-of-movement/
I was once hectored upon this very subject. I scornfully replied, "Yours is the argument of feudalism. You do know the fecking serfs couldn't move off their land, indeed could not even travel the roads without a writ of passage. But come the Black Plague, when the rules broke down, they could and they did move."
ReplyDeleteIt's one of the reasons a healthy competitive marketplace is so important.
ReplyDeleteWhile people buy goods and services from companies, companies buy labor from people. So, if a company doesn't want to pay enough, the people have the opportunity to go somewhere else.
It's also an incentive to, not just pay employees enough, but to treat them well. If my company has a lot of competitors, I need to keep my employees happy or they'll jump ship to one of my competition. Not only that, they'll take with them all the money and time I invested in their training. Which essentially means, I just paid my competitor to take my employee off my hands in the form of free (for them) training.
And it doesn't matter the size of the marketplace. Local, large, or crossing borders. Being able to freely move to better opportunities rewards people and punishes poor companies.
John Victor While I am a firm believer in the power of markets, I grimly laugh at those who believe workers have the “opportunity” to go elsewhere. Who earns the profits? Marx was a fine diagnostician of capitalism. His cure was awful but his conclusions were correct. Until workers share in the profits, capitalism remains a Tower of Babel.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure how who earns profits keeps an employee from jumping ship to a company that will pay/treat them better.
ReplyDeleteJohn Victor It's very simple. Nobody treats anyone better. All the free food and lattes in the world will not substitute for getting paid for what you do. Market rates apply to everything in this life, no exceptions. If the company does well, so should the workers,
ReplyDeleteBismarck figured this out over a century ago: to deal with communist agitators, he put workers on the boards of directors of the bigger corporations: thus short-circuiting the perpetual worker-management fight. It's part of German law, the Mitbestimmungsgesetz to this day.
Really, if you don't grasp how profit sharing keeps workers on staff, try running your own firm. I've done so for three decades and more. Replacing personnel is expensive.
But profit sharing is just another type of salary. And falls into the bucket of being paid/treated well. Just as do benefits, perks, and other form of compensation.
ReplyDeleteIf one competitor in a market starts to profit share, and it's attractive to all employees in the market, they'll move to that company. Their old company will see this. If it becomes tired enough of incurring the cost of their trainings moving to a competitor, and having to train a replacement, they'll have little choice but to adopt new policies. Maybe they find profit sharing also works for them. Or maybe it's higher pay or better benefits. Or some combination.
Regardless, healthy competition, and free movement is good for all workers. Not necessarily just for those who actually move.
Profit sharing is not salary. I despair of all this happy talk about Healthy Competition, as if Free Markets were the cure for everything from measles to mumps to menstrual cramps.
ReplyDeleteIf markets worked as advertised, the people who add the value to the proposition would earn their fraction thereof - and not some biweekly crumb in accordance with prevailing wages.
Wages have stagnated since the 1970's, to the benefit of the stockholders and corporate executives. That's what comes of neoliberal economics.
Kafka once said God might have allowed the Tower of Babel to be built, if if could be built without climbing it.
People don't just leave their homes and families and go in search of fame 'n fortune. Their situation generally descends into a shithole - and they leave because they have no alternative.
All these refugees in the world today, I guess there are about 70 million of them today? That's what comes of so many fucked up nation states. People just leave. North America filled up with them: for four centuries, it was the world's trash dump for human beings.
Freedom of movement. The law prohibits both the rich and the poor from sleeping on Anatole France's park bench. Show me a refugee or an economic migrant, I'll show you someone who's leaving, very much against his will.