Perhaps half a million Brits working in other EU countries?

Excellent piece, well found.

It’s a great find, Claude, really sums up the argument against the strikes.

Agreed. Thanks a lot for posting this. Also, seems like good news that the US Senate is toning down the ‘Buy America’ provisions in their stimulus package so that they comply with international trade law.

I bet the Daily Mail will spin this if they do use this to:

ITALIANS KICK OUT BRITS IN PETTY REVENGE

Hmmm, I’ve just posted on this subject on another thread. I can’t keep up with all you highly skilled, hard-working web designers, students and journalists. I wonder if we can find some industrious foreign workers to do your jobs more efficiently and cheaper. They certainly wouldn’t spend their time arsing around on blogs all day.

Its ironic you Daily Mail obsessives use an inflammatory tabloid article in an Italian newspaper to support your opinions. Trouble making hacks giving half-truths to oil workers to fit their agenda. Where is the reference to unemployed Italian oil-rig engineers unable to work due to cheap British labour. Oh yeah, there isn’t any is there?

As I said on another thread, The protectionist accusation is the politics of fear. Its an attempt to appeal to our ingrained fear of reprisal. “Don’t stand up to the kid kicking you because he will only kick you harder”. Its simply bullying. Its also inaccurate. The British workers abroad are not undercutting local people, they are not some company’s rent-a-cheap workforce, they are not displacing local people onto their State’s debilitating benefits system. They are fulfilling a skills deficit. The fear of irresponsible reprisals is appeasement of stupidity.

Still, if I took 10 Cornish workers and………..

So where the Brits offered jobs that Italians were not permitted to apply for? Is the rig on the mainland surrounded by a community of skilled workers in need of employment? Is there any real comparison here?

Chavscum: please read the post again, in particular Claude’s comments.

But chavscum,
don’t just believe what the tabloids tell you, will you?
The Italians and Portuguese at Lindsey are NOT “rent-a-cheap workforce”. This was said and resaid and confirmed. They are technicians and engineers brought over by the company for a one-off specific TEMPORARY project. Exactly like the Brits in the article. It’s just that the usual suspects are turning it around and dressing it up as an “immigration issue”.

“Where is the reference to unemployed Italian oil-rig engineers unable to work due to cheap British labour”, you said.
It’ll take you 30 seconds. Google “unemployment rate in Italy”. You’ll find it’s approaching 7%. I’m sure it includes a number of technicians and engineers caught in the crisis in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And in Italy too, like in the rest of Europe, the least travelled people are also of the opinion that “they all wanna cum ‘ere”EXACTLY in the style of the Daily Mail.

‘really sums up the argument against the strikes’

Doesn’t sum up your arguement, Lee: doesn’t mention Cornwall once.

How much are the “imported workers” being payed? For living in a hostel on a barge? Conditions of employment?

Nobody, and in particular those who resent their employment, can give an answer. So, given absence of response, STFU.

“Doesn’t sum up your arguement, Lee: doesn’t mention Cornwall once.”

Oh yeah. Get back to me when you have a cohesive argument against my point though.

It’s a good enough article and well done for spotting it and translating it.
However I notice it mentions that British workers are happily eating with, cooking for, and sleeping alongside, watching TV with and generally getting stuck in with their Italian counterparts on an “equal basis”. Same clock cards and everything. I think this is what it’s really about. And another poster mentions there is no mention of unemployed Italians outside moaning why they haven’t got a job, or any mention of a number of others who can’t get a job there because they are presently working in Britain, sleeping and eating on barges and kept at a distance from the UK refinery workers.

Well done though, as I say.

Just to add, I listened to Mandy today and he’s scared stiff.
He’s singing away about not talking down the economy and trying to make people with a legitimate grievance keep their mouths shut. He would like to see a quiet workforce just getting on with whatever they want to throw at people and say nothing despite their homes are being repossessed as a result of his idiocy and the governments stupid immigration and employment policies, which are more aptly named “unemployment policies”. labour out, Labour out. They are scabs on a working mans back.

Claude, there is so much mis-information about the contractors its difficult to get an honest picture. This is because the Company in question will not release full details of their employment contract. They just assure us things are hunky-dory. Anyone if a an ounce of business sense will fail to see how a contractor can pay the workers UK rates, house, feed and transport them across Europe and compete for the contract fairly. It just does not add up. I accept they are skilled workers, but that does not mean they are not cheap workers. I’ve seen reports saying the imported workers are having their transport, accommodation and subsistance deducted from their pay. If true, that’s what the people traffcikers do to the poor sods flogging moody dvds in your high street and the your girls turning tricks above your local cab office.

Just seen Sami from Liberty and Will Young (yes Will fucking Young) on Question Time tell us all, that they know fuck all about the issue, but lets not pander to the BNP, to wild cheers from the assorted lefties in the audience. Well thats it solved then. Fuck the poor unemployed with families to support, exitinguish their pride and aspirations and abandon them to welfare fishing net, but its ok ‘cos we can make some patronising statement about racism and we all feel morally superior.

PS Theresa May was also appalling. She was just reading from the central office script.

“Anyone if a an ounce of business sense will fail to see how a contractor can pay the workers UK rates, house, feed and transport them across Europe and compete for the contract fairly”

Can they do the job quicker? can they do it better?

“I’ve seen reports saying the imported workers are having their transport, accommodation and subsistance deducted from their pay.”

THE BASTARDS! Man, I *never* have to pay for my transport, or accomodation, or living costs. The EU dream is truly dead.

I’m still amazed that Charlieman still doesn’t realise what the difference is between a worker and a “contractor”. Other posters have also pointed out the difference between the Italian situation referred to in the article and the situation in the UK dispute. Sadly, it is all too easy to persuade italians to see everything as if its a football game and as Emgland appears to have scored a goal then Italy must equalise at least. No doubt various groups will exploit this. But why should that stop workers in any country from standing up to an obvious injustice?
And of course we also have here the darling “Repubblica” newspaper – a paper which would be the most read by people on this site if they were in Italy, a cross between the Guardian and the Indy and much-loved by the left. Who needs the Northern League to stir things up when “nice” papers like “Repubblica” can stir things up just as enthusiastically?
The one big question I’m wondering is just why so many Labour bigwigs, including Mandy, were so ready to defend IREM. As a good italian firm they know very well how to make sure that you procure a contract.! Was it to defend the “free movement of labour” or the not so free “movement ” of something else?

Chavscum,
you are right when you say there’s mis-information on the issue.

But I’m going to try and make this point as clearly as I can. There are a few hundred contractors completing a job for a temporary period of time only. I know it’s a vulgar comparison, but please bear with me. Imagine you are loaded and you want your house redecorated. You call the firm you think is best value for money and hire them. They bring their own people and do the job. But then imagine that a few local decorators find out about it and start going mad. “Why did you call those. We could have done it”.

But isn’t this the free market though?

Instead of checking that all decorators, by law are paying decent money, are safe, have decent breaks or that they don’t work donkeys’ hours, the issue becomes that “the local decorators should have done the job”. It’d all be very nice, but unrealistic in a contemporary free market society. See why it’s surreal?

Back to Lincolnshire. In the specific case, the job those people are doing will only take months. At the end of it, those workers are going to return home (Sicily, and Portugal, according to the reports).

For some well known reason, though, the Chinese whispers started. From the firm bringing its own full-time skilled workforce for reasons of time and efficiency, it gradually turned into “they are deliberately turning people down because they’re British, and “we are being swamped”.

It is true that some people on the left genuinely started making the case about the country’s workers losing control of their negotiating power, ability to secure good jobs for all, etc. But it took the unions (and a Labour government) 11 years to bring in watered down measures to limit the most extreme impact of agency/casual work in Britain. And, incidentally, I don’t recall any anger, sit-ins and walkouts when 750,000 jobs were offshored during “the years of binge” 1997-2007. It’s ironic that the explosion of anger took place against what is essentially the wrong target.

Anyway, The Express and the Daily Mail in particular started publishing daily opinion columns ranting against immigration. They would anyway, but this really made their mouth water. One logical somersault after the other. They’d start with Grimsby and, within the same article, talk about asylum seekers claiming benefits, our own homemade feral scum on the dole, the immigrants swamping Britain, our loss of identity thanks to Labour, the EU coup. A “Best Of”/”Golden Collection”, that has literally fuckall to do with the issue in question. See what I mean? This is how you inflame a situation and whip up populist mob mentality. Textbook.
You should have then checked the “comments”. Some were truly scary. Literally. “we all know these foreigners all wanna cum here cuz they get everything for free” and several references to “wops” and “johnny foreigners”. Again, I remind you, what did the Grimsby issue have nothing to do with this!???
It’s no wonder the BNP vultures smelt an excellent opportunity. It’s what they do for a living. And then you moan about the anti-BNP warnings, chavscum?

The Unions didn’t want to be left out. Understandably so. It’d have looked bad on them. Some of Dereck Simpson’s initial comments stated that the Italian/Portuguese workers were “on the cheap”. The Unions were asked to confirm this but, when pressed on the issue, of course, they couldn’t.

One final point and this is going to get me pilloried.
You hear stuff about the British spirit and the British bulldog and the British resolve. Yesterday the news came in that RBS (and other banks) are awarding themselves humongous bonuses with our money. Now, isn’t that something that the British should demonstrate about and get truly pissed off about?
Shouldn’t the tabloids write inches and inches of bile about that? We are being taken for a ride, pathetically so, and instead we’re just swallowing it, at best uttering to ourselves that “it’s not on”, and then meekily wait until our anger is then deflected and re-directed and mis-directed against some other harmless poor sod – just because they’re not British. Think about it. It’s embarrassing.

Sorry about the terrible mistakes in #19 above… Urgh…

“Instead of checking that all decorators, by law are paying decent money, are safe, have decent breaks or that they don’t work donkeys’ hours, the issue becomes that “the local decorators should have done the job”. It’d all be very nice, but unrealistic in a contemporary free market society. See why it’s surreal?”

This, in letters of fire six feet high.

More than half a million Brits in Europe I think. Have seen figure as high as 1.5M and 2M overall. The Italian firm involved even have a load of British workers themselves … on a job in Italy!