Originally Posted by
Cass
->
Its does seem if you want to get rid of all the immigrants and employ Brits you have to get them out of bed first..
Quote from article in the guardian.
A favourite argument of those who oppose immigration is that migrant workers "take our jobs". The Day the Immigrants Left, presented by Evan Davies (BBC1), went to Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, a town with thousands of eastern European workers and 2,000 local people on the dole. The producers arranged for 12 of the latter to replace 12 of the former for two days to see if they were as ready, willing and able to work at anything as a) they claimed and b) their immigrant counterparts were.
Half turned up late or not at all. "I won't do a job I don't find very interesting," said 26-year-old Lewis, who has been unemployed for five years and was supposed to go to a potato factory. "I do feel a little bit pressurised to get a job, but it's not to the point that I can just take any job that comes." Those that did eventually arrive were a woeful sight. Paul and Terry insisted that the potato-sorting machines had been set deliberately fast (they had actually been slowed down to accommodate the two trainees), one of many examples from the British workers of a persistent and fatally crippling sense of grievance and entitlement.
Carpenter Dean reacted with fury to his Lithuanian supervisor's instructions to use screws rather than a nail gun, which would take longer but make his plasterboard work stand firm. Ashley quit his restaurant job halfway through his first lunchtime on his first day and then sat down happily to eat the meal offered by his saintly employer Ali.
You looked in vain for a glimmer of shame or embarrassment in any of them, but came up emptyhanded. You could try to tell yourself that their attitudes masked the insecurities that come with unemployment, and at times Davies bent over backwards to put a better gloss on their behaviour: at one point, he tried to suggest to the farm owner that availability of foreign labour had made employers lazy when it came to "coaxing and motivating" local workers. But it was hard not to suspect, as you watched the infuriating dozen, stunned by the prospect of physical labour, resentful of any advice, childish and utterly unmotivated by the presence of a television crew or the knowledge that even their greatest perceived sufferings would be over within 48 hours, that the natives might just be revolting.