United Kingdom: EU “proletarian reserve army” disappeared, wages rise
In the United Kingdom there is a job crisis: in certain sectors there is no staff, with problems, for example, for the supply of supermarkets. There are no transporters, there are also no shelf workers and this translates into out-of-stock and empty shelves, a bit Soviet-style.
The data on the demand in the number of employees is quite evident, as can be seen from this graph:
In reality, the problem does not only affect the retail sector: prizes of 10 thousand pounds are offered for hiring to optometrists, 3 thousand for those who are gas technicians, but also a thousand for those who are clerk in a pet products shop . After all, the alternative to paying employees more or to granting high premiums is the one faced by McDonaldss which has had to remove Milkshakes from the assortment in many points of sale because it cannot supply them.
Is Brexit to Blame? Before leaving the Union many places in the logistics sector, especially in transport, were filled by Romanian or Polish drivers, now this operation is much more difficult. So is the staff shortage due to Brexit? No, it is simply due to the fact that the Union has kept the remuneration of labor artificially low for too many years and now this difference, this gap, is being bridged, notwithstanding, or even thanks to, the Covid-19 crisis.
If the wage trend had followed the normal supply-demand ratio, we would have had higher wages in these sectors and not a shortage of manpower. The Union has distorted the market for years with a low-cost offer, but this operation was paid for by British workers who were forced to either change jobs or accept lower wages. Once this artificial situation is over, either the wages increase, or the workers choose to do something else.
In the medium term this phenomenon will lead to an increase in the remuneration of British workers, even, indeed above all, in the most humble positions, with a social rebalancing that will revive a working middle class destroyed by Community competition. This in turn will boost domestic consumption. In the long run, investments in technology designed to improve productivity will be favored, and the system as a whole will benefit from this in terms of efficiency.
Without the "reserve proletarian army", individual countries rebalance their labor markets and adjust the demand and supply of labor and the level of wages. Too bad that for Italy, between Lamorgese and the Union, all this seems impossible.
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The article United Kingdom: EU "Proletarian Reserve Army" disappeared, wages rise comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/regno-unito-sparito-lesercito-proletario-di-riserva-della-ue-le-paghe-aumentano/ on Thu, 26 Aug 2021 08:46:47 +0000.