New people of working age entering the UK increases the supply of labour and economics tells us that will put downward pressure on wage s in jobs that are commonly done by new people to the UK. I suspect wages now in male hairdressing are lower in real terms or would be if it wasn't for National Living Wage There has been an explosion in Turkish style barbers. This is good if you want to pay £10 or less for haircut, but it must have killed off a lot of locally trained hairdressers and in more recent years put off the local population from entering gents hairdressing. Did we really have a big shortage of gents hairdressers say 30 years ago?
I accept we need some net migration, because our national birth rate has dropped and our population is becoming older, but its not 905,000 a year or no where near 905,000 a year. We have 1 million young people in the UK who are not in education, work or training, to me this needs a lot of attention and reduction and its too easy to recruit overseas and ignore these 1 million. I believe there are many in the 10m adults of working age who are not working, but again this figure is growing as net migration increases this can't be right. Significantly increasing the total UK population leads to housing and resource problems as we have seen over the last 25 years.
It only puts a downward pressure where labour supply exceeds labour demand, and for an extended period. Those who are impacted by this should in theory only be those who are competing with worse educated and equipped immigrants, who largely don't have great English. But, why would any "native" need to be in competition with those immigrants? Should they not be aiming higher? If not, why not? A lot of them need to look in the mirror.
We can't base an economy on hairdressers, and there has always been a massive market for cheap £10 hair cuts, and most of them are still cash only, I wonder why that is?
Loads "British" places l go have been doing hair cuts for ~£10 for years and for one place with multiple shops the owner drives around in a 200k Ferrari. Every shop I go to is busy (on average) and seems to be doing well, fair play to them.
A £10 cut it's only taking 10 minutes, heck when I go it's like 5 minutes, so £10 seems expensive, it's like £80-120/hr and the shops won't be expensive with overheads, not where they're typically located.
Our lass used to be a hairdresser, doing women's cuts and customers there paid ~£50-150 but they're in there a couple of hours, a lot of that time is the customers sat around waiting (gassing) mind. Our lass was a fully trained hairdresser on minimum wage, but she left as she wanted something better. I doubt the lads working in the barbers have better training than our lass did and I doubt they're on good money either. I doubt they get the tips either, as they seem to go in the till at every place I've been to.
The Turkish are well renowned as being decent barbers and do all the shaves and head massage stuff if people like that (I don't, but plenty seem to). Seems like a bit more of a targeted market to me, which is fine, we should want more choice. Most of them seem to target those of their own nationality, which is fine, it's self sustaining etc.
I work in utilities/ construction, and without immigration every major infrastructure project would grind to a halt, they rely heavily on flexible labour and agencies etc. There would still be loads of 40's and 50's white guys like me in the office having fights over e-mail with each other (still billing the client/ UK) and nobody out on site doing the actual work. Most sites are delayed or don't start because of lack of labour, and also a lack of skilled site supervision. The UK folk need to be stepping up and doing the semi-skilled/ skilled site supervision roles, and it's not often I see an immigrant doing it, actually can't recall that ever to be honest.
The young folk (mostly under 30) either don't want to go into the manual side of construction and start at the bottom, or they go in and can't hack the work or just don't actually understand that working is necessary for life. This isn't all of them of course but 80% of the young folk who we see are soft, unreliable or difficult, or a combination of. This is why there are still loads of really old labourers in the UK, as they put the graft in and they're reliable. As they're so in demand they get poached from one company to another, so it makes it tough to plan work/ labour.
Take a look at the next utilities site you see, I bet it's loads of old blokes with the shovels and in the diggers who look 20 years older than they actually are.
The foreign labour are not great in general either, largely as there are big language problems, but they will work very hard if supervised well.
Net immigration at 905k per year is needed when we have a massive labour shortage which is stifling growth. Net immigration from 2004 had flatlined for a long time, so now we're "short" as such, no matter what the press say.
We need to grow to be able to pay for the old people, stagnation is not possible unless we just cut every other public service to fund pensions? I don't think that will go down well with workers, especially seeing as they're now practically forced into funding their own pension, and most likely won't get a state pension themselves.
100% agree there isn't enough housing and resources, that's because of these reasons:
- We don't build enough of it
- We don't have enough labour, supervision, skilled supervision to build it (as in muddy boots on site, not black shoes in the office)
- What we do build takes longer and costs more than anywhere else on the world as we wrap ourselves up in red tape
- The public whinge too much about things being built and the disruption, too many NIBY'S etc
