Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Its time to get skilled...fast

"Even if you are 1 in a million, there are 1,300 copies of you in China."

The following is by Stuart Goldsmith:

"
Something critical is happening in the UK – and most people
are missing it!

We are undergoing a revolution in the low-wage, unskilled
sector due to immigration from Eastern Block countries.

That’s GOOD news if you’re middle class and skilled, or upper
class and/or wealthy.

The question is... Why?

Well, it's because, you’ll be able to get unskilled labour
and basic ‘tradesman’ services far cheaper than you did before.
Your cost of living will plummet.

But it’s VERY bad news if you or anyone you know is unskilled
or engaged in manual labour.

Here are three examples of ‘wake-up calls’, which happened
just this week.

Wake Up Call #1:

An unskilled friend of mine, male, aged 50, is currently
pushing a paintbrush for me to pay his mortgage after being
made redundant from his job as van driver.

He was on £10 an hour, which only just gave him a living
wage. He didn’t want to do the long hours and the low wages.
He’s just heard they’re now paying £5.20 an hour for the same
job and there’s a queue of East Europeans begging for a
chance.

£5.20 an hour is eight hundred a month and that’s just
totally impossible to live on if you have a couple of kids
and rent to pay. His wife works 11 hours a day taking in
ironing and STILL they could not manage when he was getting
£10 an hour.

Meanwhile... his son (age 21) is moaning like hell because he
has to get up at 6am to drive to Walthamstow where he’s an
unskilled labourer for a double glazing company.

He’s thinking of telling his boss to shove it because it’s a
bit early for him and he doesn’t enjoy the travel and the
hard work. He likes to go our drinking with his mates of an
evening and would prefer a job with a later start so he can
get more kip!

Wake Up Call #2:

I mentioned the guy who valets my car in a previous
newsletter. He’s a good friend and has always done a
brilliant job. He charges me £40 a time. You will recall he
was moaning that his customers seemed to be dropping away.

Small wonder!

Have you seen the ‘hand wash’ car places springing up? Drive
into an old garage forecourt and six Poles spring into
action. They do a brilliant job. It takes ten minutes and
costs... £6!!!

I can’t think why my friend is short of work...

But short he is, and so I called him yesterday to offer him
some work assembling racking in my store. It’s grunt work and
I didn’t want to do it. I offered him the equivalent of £15
an hour. He accepted. After a couple of hours, when I took
him a coffee, he said: “I’ve been thinking. I really need to
earn more than this a day. Can you up the rate?”

I was actually a bit shocked as I thought £32,000 a year for
putting up racking was pretty decent.

I told him no, but please, only do this work if you haven’t
got anything more lucrative on.

He didn’t come back today. I had to take his racking apart
and redo it as it was a dog’s dinner.

I moaned to a pal about this last night and he said he knew a
Romanian guy who was desperate for work. He gave me his
number. I just got through showing him the job. £8 an hour
and he is totally delighted to have it.

He’s working fast, efficiently and intelligently – twice as
hard as my unskilled friend who ‘needs’ to earn more than £15
an hour.

Then I read in The Mail (that bastion of truth and top
quality journalism!) that 6 million households in the UK have
nobody in them earning a single penny.

Okay, it may be 4 million or 3 million, but... there’s
trouble brewing and you DON’T want to be on the wrong
financial end of it.

What that means is if you are in ANY kind of ‘unskilled’,
lowly paid routine job, you had better watch your back.
Better than watching your back – it’s time to get skilled,
FAST."

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

This should only scare the stupid and/or lazy in our society. No shit he can support a couple of kids on 10/hr. Maybe he shouldn't have fucking had kids. And why didn't the son go to university so that he could avoid this pitfall? Cuz he's a lazy bastard. I want MORE immigrants here! I don't have to do my own laudry anymore cuz I pay an immigrant to do it. Someone else would ask an arm and a leg, and then complain about how they weren't getting paid enough. Bring in more unskilled labor!!! This is what we need. My parents were lower, lower middle class, so since I'm not stupid or lazy, I worked hard in school and when to uni on private scholarship, I have absolutely no sympathy for those who didn't do the same.

Anonymous said...

Same here in California. Even with a skill it is still hard to survive with all the illegals coming from Mexico. I saw the same thing in South Africa only it was much worse. The Africans are puring in from the north. Anything that was not protected by a 12 foot fence was looted and burned to the ground. I thought this is what America is going to look like in the near future.

Anonymous said...

"Tradesman" services as to what definition? - there are quite a few painters and plumbers [that's as basic as you get] making over $80,000 US dollars per year - some even more - while some "college educated" guy is breaking his head for less than half the amount.

It all comes down to the market you are in and what is in demand per your particular demographic... supply and demand...Economics 101. Even drug dealers work off this principle.

This sounds like more "pop" culture self-esteem advice one would find in the Lame Stream Media for women and teenagers - those not fully grounded in reality. [No offense Darren to your choice of post :)]

Furthermore, it assumes everybody is at the same income level as the author and that people will continue to outsource (or have the luxury) to outsource to manual labor (in reality: service labor) - which is actually a cost to live.

Most rich people I know do most of this basic stuff themselves (a famous CEO of an American company told me "It is important to always wash your car as to find the minor dents that might become rust spots later - which the car washer will not care about") that this author is assuming they outsource - and people that try to act rich or pretend they are rich have other people do this basic stuff for them.

Jason said...

CT4M continues to improve. Your posts are insightful and personal, and the more diverse subject matter is adding much needed variety to the blog. Also your posts on feminism seem much more measured and persuasive than the rants of the past, which I think gives them a far wider impact. Keep up the good work!

Anonymous said...

1st anonymous: Yes, I do agree that too many of the native population here are complacent/lazy. Although it is no wonder that some immigrants here are so keen to work, because they can use the comparatively high wages here to buy a cheaper house back home. The native population here can't.

Cybro: Out of interest, I heard recently that before the white men settled in South Africa there were actually very few native blacks there. It was something I didn't know before.

2nd Anonymous: (I assume you are different to the 1st one!): Yes, I should have pointed out that the article was UK-centric. Plumbers here can certain earn a good wage, but painters generally don't (I know, I used to be one), the only exception being if they run their own company.

Jason: Thanks. Glad you like the site. Please tell your friends bout it!

Anonymous said...

I do not understand the obsession with overcrowding and cheap labour. Do people just naturally like to live on top of one another? I guess so. When given a choice between a clean, sparsely populated environment, and a polluted, overcrowded hell-hole, people will gravitate to the hell-hole every time.