To Many People

bonny scotland

I wish our goverment was much tougher on migrant workers .
Scotland is a small country which has seen a massive influx of eastern european workers since they joined the Economic union.

Of those workers a large part of them are ,or supposed to be skilled building workers. I've came accross a gang of carpenters , well one of them was and the rest ,well who knows, we lost a good foreman on that job because he got fed up trying to communicate to the gang who could only speak broken english.
An ames taping friend of mine working for himself on pricework had just come back from a site in Edinburgh where Polish tapers were working and the price for taping a penthouse flat had been manipulated to deny my friend any hope of achieving the proper price for the job . Now I am in no way against anybody making a living but there is just so many eastern bloc workers in Scotland that they are driving proper pricing structures down which affects us regular Scottish workers also. The only people who are winning out of all of this is the contractor who employs them at reduced rate lining his pockets all the way to the bank I despair and quite concerned about the future if it continues unchecked.

awra best

jiggyjack

I've run into similar situations here in the US with illegal immigrants who do construction for dirt cheap.

I don't have an answer for you all I can say is I empathize.

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go do it

thats interesting bonny

as you probably know we have the same problem in the us with mexican (for the most part) labor.

and i am telling people all the time that it is not a racist issue it is an economic issue

you are in the same boat that we are except your cheep labor is white

ModernStyle

Illegals must be hunted down and terminated.

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bonny scotland

it's not that they are illegal or anything ,or so they say, but since the Communist Iron curtain came down and the previous 'oppressed' peoples of the old communist states joined the European union they are free to roam at large all over europe and drive our building trade prices down.

Grumpyplumber

Think of things in the broader, bigger picture.
They'll work cheaper...then struggle to be able to afford the cost of living..so have to push harder or cut corners, an ugly circular pattern.

Things have a tendancy to fall in place...any market that attracts "bargain" workmanship is a market you're better off without...let them eat up all the bargain hunters while you continue to offer quality to those willing/able to pay for it.
Then...a few years down the road...you're the one going back to repair their "bargains".

Tom R

mikezap

One of the mexican problems is overbreeding. I was working alongside a crew of amigos once and they asked if I send money back to my parents. I was like WTF? They claim the more children you have, the more money they'll send you later on in life. They believe in large families. We can thank the damn Catholic church for that.
I've worked all over California and the only place they haven't taken over is North Lake Tahoe. No contractor is going to hire an unskilled hombre to work on a multimillion dollar house.

pstorey

"No contractor is going to hire an unskilled hombre to work on a multimillion dollar house."
Take a drive through Pacific Heights and you'll change your tune.

San Francisco contractors use probably 80% immigrant labor and it's frustrating to see some of them flouting lead abatement and other laws openly. There is new legislation being introduced to replace the existing, unenforced legislation (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...GIMM.DTL&tsp=1) but unless people organise to see it enforced I predict more of the same as the years go by.

thom

I fail to see how this relates to a problem with immigrant labor. Seems to me to be a problem with the contractors hired to do the job who ignore the law and law enforcement who are not interested in enforcing the law.

The real problem is passing a limitless amount of legislation with the intent of making people feel good that something is being done when in fact nothing is being done. From my perspective liberals tend to want increasing amounts of "authoritave control" and decreasing amounts of "actual control". It's a contradiction borne of the belief that we can force people to be the kind of people they "should" be while at the same time allowing people to act as they please with no limits on behavior.