Polly Toynbee wants us all to know that Brexit is going to mean higher wages for the low paid in our society. Polly thinks this is a bad idea and we’re not quite so sure.
The argument in favour of free migration is that those migrating benefit - they, as we, are God’s special snowflakes and why should they be denied the wealth and glory of our society based upon nothing but accident of birth? Whatever your answer to that it is clear that restricting the free movement of labour will raise local wages.
If there is to be no more cheap foreign labour, he will need to raise pay steeply to attract enough British staff.
Yes, quite so, and the problem with this is? As we pointed out elsewhere last year:
Brexit is about to give us a problem with this, though. Karl Marx was right: wages won’t rise when there’s spare labour available, his “reserve army” of the unemployed. The capitalist doesn’t have to increase pay to gain more workers if there’s a squad of the starving eager to labour for a crust. But if there are no unemployed, labour must be tempted away from other employers, and one’s own workers have to be pampered so they do not leave. When capitalists compete for the labour they profit from, wages rise.
Britain’s reserve army of workers now resides in Wroclaw, Vilnius, Brno, the cities of eastern Europe. The Polish plumbers of lore did flood in and when the work dried up they ebbed away again. The net effect of Brexit will be that British wages rise as the labour force shrinks and employers have to compete for the sweat of hand and brow.
As we were in fact warned before the referendum in 2016:
The wages of low-paid workers would rise if Britain left the EU, the chairman of the campaign to remain in Europe admitted yesterday.
Lord Rose, the former boss of Marks & Spencer, told MPs that ending free movement would mean less competition for Labour, so pay would go up.
British wages for workers in Britain rise. Especially at the low end. Isn’t this what Polly has been campaigning for over the past 5 decades?
Certainly, we can see the downside of it - we are cutting off considerable numbers from the glories of working in Britain. But the actual thing being complained about, that wages will rise. Someone is going to have to tell us what’s so horrible about that.