he says in that transcript that foreign nationals are only a fifth of care workers so not that reasonable to map it to migrants in general. the wiping bums bit is reductive but he has a short time to deliver the general idea that this is a thankless and unpleasant job, it’s an error but i don’t think it’s that bad
the gist is understandable, but the direction of logic is “who will do degrading work with birth rates being what they are” instead of “who will care for unable people with birth rates being what they are”, it shouldn’t be thankless job
you’re right it shouldn’t be thankless but it currently is, at least in terms of pay. similar arguments (who will pick strawberries etc) are made by middle class lib types but i think polanski is trying genuinely to put the case that inward migration is beneficial, clumsily in this instance
but in this framing is everything, because who will pick strawberries is bad argument not because it’s wrong, but because it doesn’t point to (leftist/just/equitable) solution, porkies managed to get strawberry pickers under tories, under labour and will manage under farage, it’s capital interest after all. Saying you want worker’s rights for strawberry pickers is entirely different proposition from “we need them lmao”
i’m heading out but not sure that the necessity to capitalism of the role matters to this type of argument in favour of migrant workers. good chance i’m wrong though, thanks for your responses, i will check back later
no, but circular logic of immigrant labor is this: we can’t pay full citizen with worker protections the salary to take this job (frequently menial and hard, for example in usa media i remember reading a story that someone tried to get bell pepper pickers for 15 bucks an hour, and local workers fucked off after a month) or change the conditions of the job (more frequent breaks/portable chairs/higher number of workers) for them to consider, so we have to get someone without rights who can’t complain (south americans in usa/romanians+asians for uk) because we can just shove them out of a country without paying them a cent/penny if they start to complain.
And we can’t raise prices because without using tariffs we can’t compete with pisraeli strawberries or whatever, and we can’t do tariffs because we are all free marketers. Thus immigrant labour and it’s “necessity” for porkies. (as an aside, funnily enough, apparently consumers are fine with paying through the nose because we have to sanction russia’s energy, and still raise food prices.) it all comes down to workers rights/compensation/and regard for those workers by the public, if you can convince them migrants are dirty subhumans, maybe they are more likely to ignore abominable conditions of their lives and labour, and still import them, cause you need them.
and same goes for hospitality/nursing etc, where you create shitty llc to subcontract for big business that labor, so when it goes tits up, they point to llc who provided migrants, and that firm is a fiction without any liabilities or anything, and one man office in cyprus.
he says in that transcript that foreign nationals are only a fifth of care workers so not that reasonable to map it to migrants in general. the wiping bums bit is reductive but he has a short time to deliver the general idea that this is a thankless and unpleasant job, it’s an error but i don’t think it’s that bad
the gist is understandable, but the direction of logic is “who will do degrading work with birth rates being what they are” instead of “who will care for unable people with birth rates being what they are”, it shouldn’t be thankless job
you’re right it shouldn’t be thankless but it currently is, at least in terms of pay. similar arguments (who will pick strawberries etc) are made by middle class lib types but i think polanski is trying genuinely to put the case that inward migration is beneficial, clumsily in this instance
but in this framing is everything, because who will pick strawberries is bad argument not because it’s wrong, but because it doesn’t point to (leftist/just/equitable) solution, porkies managed to get strawberry pickers under tories, under labour and will manage under farage, it’s capital interest after all. Saying you want worker’s rights for strawberry pickers is entirely different proposition from “we need them lmao”
i’m heading out but not sure that the necessity to capitalism of the role matters to this type of argument in favour of migrant workers. good chance i’m wrong though, thanks for your responses, i will check back later
no, but circular logic of immigrant labor is this: we can’t pay full citizen with worker protections the salary to take this job (frequently menial and hard, for example in usa media i remember reading a story that someone tried to get bell pepper pickers for 15 bucks an hour, and local workers fucked off after a month) or change the conditions of the job (more frequent breaks/portable chairs/higher number of workers) for them to consider, so we have to get someone without rights who can’t complain (south americans in usa/romanians+asians for uk) because we can just shove them out of a country without paying them a cent/penny if they start to complain.
And we can’t raise prices because without using tariffs we can’t compete with pisraeli strawberries or whatever, and we can’t do tariffs because we are all free marketers. Thus immigrant labour and it’s “necessity” for porkies. (as an aside, funnily enough, apparently consumers are fine with paying through the nose because we have to sanction russia’s energy, and still raise food prices.) it all comes down to workers rights/compensation/and regard for those workers by the public, if you can convince them migrants are dirty subhumans, maybe they are more likely to ignore abominable conditions of their lives and labour, and still import them, cause you need them.
and same goes for hospitality/nursing etc, where you create shitty llc to subcontract for big business that labor, so when it goes tits up, they point to llc who provided migrants, and that firm is a fiction without any liabilities or anything, and one man office in cyprus.