10 Years On - A British Straw Man Without the European Union

What is the lot of the workers of Britain?

Ashley Grayson is one of those whose been taken on at Gentle Breezes. He’s a school leaver who decided that tuition fees made university unaffordable for him.

Ashley is unhappy with his job and his prospects. ‘We’re doing badly here, and we’re constantly at risk of being out-competed by more efficient businesses in the EU or BRIC countries. And if I don’t want to work overtime, which the boss demands of us so he can meet his targets and get his bonus, I don’t really have a choice. When things go really crazy here, I can end up missing a whole weekend, but work is more important than family. It helps us keep our heads above water and this year Nikki, my girlfriend, who’s at college, and me travelled to Miami rather than Ibiza, ignoring the environmental damage caused by air travel. Nikki says I wouldn’t have to work such long hours if I lived in Strasbourg, say, or Milan. She says there you’re not allowed to do more than forty-eight hours a week and they’re even thinking of lowering that to forty-four. If you do, you – and your boss – are breaking the law and there’ll be plenty who’ll chase you for it. So everyone’s trying to have a healthy work-life balance.’

He tells us Nikki herself has her eyes on a year at Nantes improving her French. The programmes that allowed British and foreign students to spend time overseas came crashing to a halt in 2010, as the EU gave priority to citizens of member states that would ultimately contribute back to the EU economy. With Britain out of the EU, integration could happen at a much faster rate without the majority of Europe having to bend over backwards to please Britain’s eurosceptic fringe any more.

Talking to Ashley it’s clear he knows and accepts that no one these days can expect to have a job for life. ’Our employment regulations aren’t the same as theirs are now,’ he says, ‘I’ve heard they put the emphasis on supporting businesses through hard times rather than letting them collapse, with all the social costs that brings. What that says to me is that when things get tough, in downturns, EU businesses – and especially small businesses, where most jobs are created – are far more likely to survive. They don’t just let businesses go under and claim this is the way the market is supposed to work, and that better businesses will come along after the storm.’

He’s right, of course. Britain still hasn’t paid off the debt from the last recession, where shocking numbers of new small business folded because the government took an insular and laissez-faire approach to the economy. Fuelled by greed, the bubble burst. That wasn’t bad for the bankers and the people who ran failing companies, they got bonuses; but it was catastrophic for the employees. A blind and self-centred policy designed to make the rich better off resulted in hundreds of thousands of citizens losing their jobs and queues of former city traders not able to get one either.

In Britain, unemployment levels initially rose quickly and it took Britain longer to get out of the recession than the Eurozone. Moreover, our businesses soon found themselves blocked from world markets through our dependence on the unpopular pound. Those countries where governments decided to subsidise massively the key state industries, managed to transition them to make the structural changes other countries made in the 1980s, but without the social turmoil. In other words, taxpayers there have been, and still are, getting good return on their investment, working in an economy that can support big industries which export advanced products overseas, while Britain struggles to find multinational firms that want to invest here. The whole system took time, but being coordinated at the European level made things much smoother than they would have been if all the countries were squabbling over their short-term national self-interest – countries like Britain.

Mike Harrison is in charge of HR at a retail chain with a head office in Peterborough. He makes the point that now, in 2020, HR professionals don’t have to take account of the well-balanced and socially responsible policies to which Brussels subjected UK employers in the early years of this century.

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he says to us, ‘leaving the EU really has allowed us to set up a wicked Dickensian regime where we can exploit the workforce and just ignore their side of the deal. That’s the way we’ve wanted things for a long time. We have a government that writes recruitment, employment and reward policies with a divide-and-conquer mindset that turns workers against each other, treating the British economy in isolation, squandering its strengths and exploiting its weaknesses, which fits in with our Anglo-Saxon way of doing things.’

He goes on to emphasise that there should be a balance between what is right for and fair to employees and what the business’s other interested parties need, but with repressive laws against trade unions and striking, there isn’t much the employees can do if that balance isn’t found.

‘Not the least of the people finding things tough, by a long chalk, is the Tax Man. Don’t laugh. We in the private sector generate the revenue this country lives off, and with a weakened economy the government has had to cut back on public spending.’

With a half-resigned sigh, he can’t resist telling us about some of the things he sees going on in the EU, things he wishes the country could get back; things he thinks would re-establish the balance he’s just been talking about.

‘They’re bringing in programs to help young people and healthy older people find new job opportunities. I mean, how do you make something like that work in practice? I don’t know, but they’ve been successful so far. Brussels has implemented a wide package of provisions eked out of the Social Charter,’ he says. ‘Over there they’ve had a massive leap in cases where employees have been given decent wages for menial or unpleasant work, as employers realise that demanding jobs need appropriate incentives to retain hard working staff. The vital role of men in family life for a healthy society has been acknowledged and employers are flexible when it comes to family emergencies. There was even one protective mother who won the right to have her child’s special needs handled sensitively by the school. Plus there are the other, associated, advances. They brought in new regulations to govern time spent in stressful locations, saving thousands of lives a year and preventing countless injuries and psychological conditions. There were rigid requirements for breaks when working while seated, so no one was forced to work their whole week in one position. Oh, and there were great improvements made to the management of building sites, allowing people to clock in at different times. The EU has made a few mistakes, and even had to reverse a law they made after they introduced it in 2017, but no group of people is perfect and the EU has the checks and balances to spot mistakes and learn from them. They’ve still succeeded in giving their citizens new freedoms like the freedom to withhold your labour to encourage coordinated economic restructuring (with the complementary freedom to not pay someone who is withholding their labour). Even more significantly, and this beats the lot, they even set up programs to provide jobseekers with vocational training in areas where traditional industries have been displaced. Apparently one region even got funding to promote the use of Free Software!’

So British business is once again a sob story. Back in the EU, Health and Safety, is one of a list of improvements in the working environments of its citizens. Still, if nothing else, H & S has spawned an obvious canard to help right-wing groups sour people’s opinions of the EU, with eurosceptic propaganda mills being a growth industry, employing thousands of people across Britain. Meanwhile talented designers in Europe are global leaders in creating warning signs intelligible across borders, reminding companies to not hand flimsy containers full of overheated liquids to the general public. At least that makes one area in which British companies aren’t in competition with the mainland.

Oops, did I just say “mainland”?