Writing in the Telegraph, Sean Thomas says his 20 year-old daughter can’t find a job – any job, stacking shelves, washing pots, bar work – because the state has allowed all the work to go to migrants at a shocking ratio of 27 to one. Here’s an excerpt.
Do you remember what you did during the long summer breaks from university? I’m ashamed I don’t really, mainly because I did nothing much. I went inter-railing with friends and slept in a phone box in Vienna. I was so bored I tried to see if nutmeg is hallucinogenic (it isn’t, really). Most of all I relied on my middle-class parents for cash, but they didn’t mind as I was the lucky generation that was paid to go to uni so they didn’t have to fund me the rest of the year.
Of course, I had friends who weren’t this lucky and had to find summer work – but they did it with ease. There was work everywhere, back in the day. How different it is now. My daughter is 20. A few days ago she was nearly in tears because she cannot find a summer job.
Not a career, not a glossy internship – a job. “Dad, I’ll do anything,” she said. “I’ll wash dishes at six in the morning.” And she meant it: she did exactly that last year, gladly. Her work ethic is way more impressive than mine. And yet this year there is nothing. Let’s be precise about the kind of work we mean. I’m talking about the first rung on the ladder. Stacking shelves, wiping tables, cleaning toilets. The work by which a young person learns there is dignity in earning a living. And, more importantly, earns money.
Is my daughter an aberration? The numbers say not. Youth unemployment stands at 16.2%, the worst since 2015 – worse even than at the peak of the pandemic, when the economy was switched off at the mains. A Government review has warned of a “lost generation”, and has put the bill at £125 billion a year. It means real people, my daughter among them, going painfully workless, with all the damage that causes.
You might assume the cause is impersonal – a temporary slump, or the machines coming for us all. But then you read the news, and it turns weary resignation into something hotter, because you see much of this is deliberate.
This week we learnt that more than 150 takeaways and kebab shops have been granted Government licences to recruit staff from overseas – and that those workers may bring dependants, to lean on the same schools, surgeries and housing our young can no longer afford. Why? There are 1.8 million unemployed people in this country. There is a willing young woman at my table who will scrub a pan at dawn. And the considered response of the British state is to issue paperwork so a kebab shop – or a vape store, or a car wash – can fly someone in to do it instead.
I don’t blame those who come; they are doing the rational thing, as I would. My quarrel is with a Government that looked at the first jobs of its own children and decided that they are surplus to requirements.
Consider one figure, carefully, because it ought to end careers. Since the start of 2020, for every additional young Briton who found a payrolled job, employers took on 27 young workers from outside the EU.
Worth reading in full.
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Why is a twenty yr old person stacking shelves? Isn’t that a job for high school kids. Why doesn’t a 20 year old have skills, education, to get a better job?
high school jobs include stacking shelves, working at McDonald’s, Burger King.
In the 1950s/60s the main complaint against “immigrants” was they were displacing the indigenous from the labour force with their cheap labour, and pulling pay levels down.
Unions who had union-member only agreement with managements, refused to”immigrants” union membership.
This was branded “racism”.
The Government was desparatecfor cheap labour in its State-run economy to reduce its enormous payroll expense.
So, the Race Relations Act 1963 was passed, and this stopped unions’ “race discrimination” – and here we are today.
There is a reluctance to talk about this.
First they work the student visa racket and then they work the care homes racket. I never really understood the problem until it landed on my doorstep. I have a neighbour who is, quite frankly, taking the British taxpayer to the cleaners. One job, but a husband and 2 children and a third arrived shortly after she started “work”, thereby taking full advantage of maternity leave etc. We are educating her children and her husband has taken a job that could easily have gone to a native Brit (in a call centre, I believe, but working from home, so who knows how much he is actually doing).
Hope those delusional Makersfield Labour voters are happy
Well people voted for selling their children/grandchildren down the river, and then last week did it again, still refuse to believe we are being replaced, so whose fault is it really?
The Establishment doesn’t care because their precious offspring will never have to compete with hordes of cheap, foreign labour.
The ladder has only been pulled up for the progeny of the despised working class.
Of course, that situation may well change for the Establishment’s precious offspring in the near future as the advent of A1 cuts a swathe through the entry-level jobs for the professions and the Lanyard Class. Suddenly their children may also want access to a low-paid, low-status job in the Care Industry, hospitality or retail …. and they will find that their parents either gave them to immigrants or deliberately destroyed them via excessive regulation and over-taxation.
I’m glad I’m no longer young. My two sons are approaching middle age and (currently) have decent careers. Neither have children and I think it would probably be for the best if it stays that way.
I suppose the voters of Makerfield who voted for more of the same are all on benefits.
Oddly enough, roughly the same amount in one form or another.
The whole caper reeks of scamming the ‘system’.
I wouldn’t say it was scamming the system if the system is so moronically setup that importing potential rapists to work in kebab shops is allowed.
The government claims it’s tightened the rules on foreign workers so they now have earn more than the national average wage, I seem to remember the figure being £38,000/year, before they can get a work visa. Surely people working in kebab shops and take-aways don’t earn this much unless the owner arranges a visa for one of his mates pays them a huge salary and his mate gives most of it back to him to make it look like the rules are being followed.
It seems like no one at the home office or border force has got the common sense to realise this may well be happening and refuse to issue the work visas or investigate the businesses claiming to pay workers well above the average wage for the type of work they’re doing.
There is a (very long) temporary shortage list which has lower limits for some roles, though I could not see kebab shop operative in the list: Skilled Worker visa: temporary shortage list – GOV.UK
There are also lower rates for under 26: Skilled Worker visa: minimum salary if you’re under 26, studying, training or in a postdoctoral role – GOV.UK – this list includes “catering managers” on low wage.
How about the wives, children, siblings, aunts, uncles, grannies who are in their retinue who don’t work? What about immigrants on the dole?
It’s interesting that the lead picture shows a Co-Op worker. Throughout my adult life, I’ve mainly been self-employed as a freelance writer. My only other job was working in Sainsbury’s as a shelf-stacker, and I don’t mind admitting that my mother, who still works on the checkouts, got me the job, so I’ve never had to endure a job interview. I was five years in Sainsbury’s, and since my writing was taking off, it was five years ago that I left Sainsbury’s to write full-time.
Unless you’ve got some foolproof get-rich-quick scheme and some sort of superhuman self-discipline, I can’t recommend freelance work because, if you’re like me, you’ll end up working all day, every evening and every weekend, struggle to separate your work life from your personal life, never have a holiday, and have to put up with friends and family who are convinced that, because you’re often working from home, you’re leading a life of eternal leisure… and it can make you quite miserable.
That’s fine if you’re making the money to justify it. Years ago, I was, but the publishers I work for pay all their writers non-negotiable fixed rates and, while minimum wage has steadily increased… Read more »
buy yourself a skirt and a blonde wig, slap some lippy on and call yourself Marcia. You’ll be starting on Monday.