My 18 year old is moving to Kazakhstan to attend the university of life.

[Greg]

Same reason farmers hire Hispanics in the US: most whites simply refuse to do the work

They refuse to work for the low wages that the migrants are willing to accept?

That's understandable.  The English can fall back on a welfare system.  The visiting worker cannot.

I wouldn't work for £10 per hour.  I'd spend the time on the internet, learn about some esoteric banking compliance regulation in banking, like Basel III and then sell myself into a £30 per hour job working in a bank.  Something the Kazakh or Nigerian cannot possibly do.  You're much better off educating yourself in something that white middle-class people employ white middle-class people to do.

Or sit back on welfare, get free things of Freecycle, ebay some of it for cash and enjoy my free time.

What I want to know is why you hate hard working Kazakh fruit pickers so much?  If the opportunity is there for them to pick fruit and they do so legally, then why should a lazier British or Nigerian person get preference over them?

That just raises costs and make British wines uncompetitive and the farmers unemployed.

[awkward customer]

I'm not changing my story.  Go and read what I wrote rather than what you want to believe I wrote.

The English people did not last out the first week except for my son and one other (his school friends).  Said that in the first post.

Other gangs were brought in from Romania, Nigeria and other places.  Nobody outworked the Kazakhs.

Since the Kazakhs have paid for a working visa to Britain to pick fruit, and a flight, if they work the hardest why should anyone else get preference over them based on their nationality?

You are arguing as though they are illegal immigrants.  They're not.

This is what you wrote.  Post 9.

He got a gang of Kazakh pickers 2 extra weeks of work today.  He said to the foreman "what is the point of keeping the other people when they are picking half of the grapes that the Kazakhs are" and the foreman took his advice and kept the Kazakh workers. The women who ran the Kazakh team was really pleased and has exchanged social media details so he can give them English lessons on line.  There is also a gang from Turkmenistan attached to them.  They are staying in caravans somewhere near Ashford and basically want to earn as much money as possible so they can return and support their families.

Everyday they are not working is a big loss to them as they have nothing else to do here in the UK.

I think they are very surprised to find a well educated Englishman grafting like they are and picking grapes.  All the other English have fallen by the wayside.  Mind you I don't blame them at £10 per hour.

[LausTibiChriste]

It is getting quite heated here. I guess I should step in to remind everyone that we are all brother and sister Catholics here and we shouldn't hate each other even if we do have different opinions. In the sight of God we all belong to one big family so maybe it would be good to cool things down. So, what do you say?

Found the new guy

[awkward customer]

Same reason farmers hire Hispanics in the US: most whites simply refuse to do the work

They refuse to work for the low wages that the migrants are willing to accept?

That's understandable.  The English can fall back on a welfare system.  The visiting worker cannot.

I wouldn't work for £10 per hour.  I'd spend the time on the internet, learn about some esoteric banking compliance regulation in banking, like Basel III and then sell myself into a £30 per hour job working in a bank.  Something the Kazakh or Nigerian cannot possibly do.  You're much better off educating yourself in something that white middle-class people employ white middle-class people to do.

Or sit back on welfare, get free things of Freecycle, ebay some of it for cash and enjoy my free time.

What I want to know is why you hate hard working Kazakh fruit pickers so much?  If the opportunity is there for them to pick fruit and they do so legally, then why should a lazier British or Nigerian person get preference over them?

That just raises costs and make British wines uncompetitive and the farmers unemployed.

Oh, get lost.

How dare you suggest that I "hate hard working Kazakh fruit pickers"?  You're using the tactics of the Left, making personal attacks when their arguments run out.

Everything is about price and profit to you, isn't it and you've taught your son well.

If you choose to see human beings merely as units of productive labour then that's your loss.

And all so that you can be a great little minion of the capitalist class who would throw you under a bus tomorrow if it suited them and leave you on the same scrap heap as all the English plumbers and fruit pickers.

[awkward customer]

It is getting quite heated here. I guess I should step in to remind everyone that we are all brother and sister Catholics here and we shouldn't hate each other even if we do have different opinions. In the sight of God we all belong to one big family so maybe it would be good to cool things down. So, what do you say?

I don't hate Greg.  Can't speak for him though ...

[Greg]

Listen to yourself, accusing people of being losers in life because they want to earn some spare cash working in the fields, as English people have always done until gangs of foreign labourers started arriving and denying them this work.

This is clearly not the case.  The site started out with English workers, mostly recent school leavers.  The vast majority could not hack the hard work.  They quit, they were not fired.  My son is still there after all and they've asked him to stay the full six weeks.  But he only ever intended to work for 3 weeks and then decided to do a fourth.

I've heard stories too.  Foreign workers bullying the local workers, grabbing everything for themselves, driving down their wages and generally being obnoxious.

Yeah, sure you have.  We have all heard stories.

How would a bunch of non-English speaking Kazahks be able to sell themselves to English farmers working for a British winemaker Chapel Down?

Why don't these wily foreigners manage to drive down the bonuses of investment bankers or London plumbers, or anything else?

And why do they chose the lowest paid work to drive the price down?  Why not £30 per hour down to £20 per hour?

The farmers pay the agency bosses a fee based on each acre or hectare picked.  The agency bosses hire whoever they are able based on the weather.  The hourly rate is the same £10 which is above minimum wage in the UK by about £1 per hour.  Since the gang bosses are English and the farmers are English then all things being equal they would prefer to hire English speaking workers.  The harsh reality is that other nationalities work a lot harder because they are motivated by the money.

You are basically spouting a lot of nonsense.  What is happening is market pricing.  In a rich society people don't need to work as hard because there is welfare.  The fact that Twitter could fire 80% of its staff and nothing happened, shows that many people are doing bugger all for the wages they earn.  In stands to reason that the farmers want to get a profit from their grape planting investment, so have a competitive bid for the picking of the grapes, and the picking bidders hire the gang bosses who can complete the contract and the wages are fixed at just over £10 per hour, so the people who are going to last in the job are those who pick the most grapes.

That is called a market economy and market driven pricing.

What you are espousing is a system where lazy British workers would have £130 a day for pouncing around in a field chatting and the wine maker would go bust then the fields would lie fallow (Zimbabwe comes to mind).

I used to know people who regularly picked fruit in the fields of Kent every summer.  Were they "losers in life"? Well they've lost that work, thanks to people like your son.

And I knew people who worked in British car factories and printed newspapers in Wapping.

They were shitty lazy unionised workers and made shitty products and Germans and Japanese and Koreans and Mexicans outperformed them.  The best of them are now making Turbofan engines for Rolls Royce in Derby.  The Printers union was smashed to pieces by Margaret Thatcher and Desktop Publishing and good riddance.  That was a racket.

[Greg]

This is what you wrote.  Post 9.

He got a gang of Kazakh pickers 2 extra weeks of work today.  He said to the foreman "what is the point of keeping the other people when they are picking half of the grapes that the Kazakhs are" and the foreman took his advice and kept the Kazakh workers. The women who ran the Kazakh team was really pleased and has exchanged social media details so he can give them English lessons on line.  There is also a gang from Turkmenistan attached to them.  They are staying in caravans somewhere near Ashford and basically want to earn as much money as possible so they can return and support their families.

Everyday they are not working is a big loss to them as they have nothing else to do here in the UK.

I think they are very surprised to find a well educated Englishman grafting like they are and picking grapes.  All the other English have fallen by the wayside.  Mind you I don't blame them at £10 per hour.

And where does that suggest that the workers who lost the opportunity to work for another two weeks there were British?

And even if they were what of it?

If there were a British Investment Banker with a work permit to work in the USA and a US citizen both competing for the same job at Goldman Sachs, would you suggest that the American should get a preference for it?

If so, what was the point of getting a work permit and paying all that money?

[Greg]

Everything is about price and profit to you, isn't it and you've taught your son well.

If you choose to see human beings merely as units of productive labour then that's your loss.

And all so that you can be a great little minion of the capitalist class who would throw you under a bus tomorrow if it suited them and leave you on the same scrap heap as all the English plumbers and fruit pickers.

I'm still waiting for your global digital currency to be forced onto everyone and cash to disappear.

How would you suggest that the farmer with the grapes should proceed and turn a profit if he was determined to hire British only fruit pickers?

[awkward customer]

This is what you wrote.  Post 9.

He got a gang of Kazakh pickers 2 extra weeks of work today.  He said to the foreman "what is the point of keeping the other people when they are picking half of the grapes that the Kazakhs are" and the foreman took his advice and kept the Kazakh workers. The women who ran the Kazakh team was really pleased and has exchanged social media details so he can give them English lessons on line.  There is also a gang from Turkmenistan attached to them.  They are staying in caravans somewhere near Ashford and basically want to earn as much money as possible so they can return and support their families.

Everyday they are not working is a big loss to them as they have nothing else to do here in the UK.

I think they are very surprised to find a well educated Englishman grafting like they are and picking grapes.  All the other English have fallen by the wayside.  Mind you I don't blame them at £10 per hour.

And where does that suggest that the workers who lost the opportunity to work for another two weeks there were British?

What were they then?

And even if they were what of it?

They're your neighbours.

If there were a British Investment Banker with a work permit to work in the USA and a US citizen both competing for the same job at Goldman Sachs, would you suggest that the American should get a preference for it?

Yes, definitely.

If so, what was the point of getting a work permit and paying all that money?

They wouldn't bother if no-one employed them to undercut wages.  Instead they might have to build up their own economies, and given what excellent workers they are they should have no trouble at all.

[Mister Cowboy]

Well, you two can argue all you want but at the end of the day we've got to forgive each other. As for me, I can't help much as I haven't worked much or maybe even haven't worked much at all. That's all I can say...

[awkward customer]

Everything is about price and profit to you, isn't it and you've taught your son well.

If you choose to see human beings merely as units of productive labour then that's your loss.

And all so that you can be a great little minion of the capitalist class who would throw you under a bus tomorrow if it suited them and leave you on the same scrap heap as all the English plumbers and fruit pickers.

I'm still waiting for your global digital currency to be forced onto everyone and cash to disappear.

How would you suggest that the farmer with the grapes should proceed and turn a profit if he was determined to hire British only fruit pickers?

And meanwhile the British government is uploading all the passport photographs on its database into its facial recognition system. All those cameras can now identify you from your passport photograph.

As for the farmers, given that the entire capitalist/corporatist system treats human beings as units of labour, as you do, they have a problem, especially with the supermarkets playing their part by demanding higher profits and hence lower produce prices.

Just out of interest, how much of the fruit your son was picking was grown in polytunnels?  The reason I'm asking is that fruit grown in this way tastes like wood, IMO, and isn't worth eating, let alone growing.

This country manged to produce plenty of food when local farms were worked by local people, as I remember.  And the food tasted better.

The corporatist system that you praise has done nothing but harm.

[clau clau]

It is getting quite heated here. I guess I should step in to remind everyone that we are all brother and sister Catholics here and we shouldn't hate each other even if we do have different opinions. In the sight of God we all belong to one big family so maybe it would be good to cool things down. So, what do you say?

Am I my brothers keeper?  </sarcasm>

[awkward customer]

Why don't these wily foreigners manage to drive down the bonuses of investment bankers or London plumbers, or anything else?

They do.  Wages across the board have barely risen for years as there's been an influx of cheap foreign labour into all sectors of the economy.  And that's one of the aims behind the influx, to keep wages down.

Perhaps you could explain why President Putin doesn't import gangs of foreigners to undercut Russian wages?

Could it be that he rejects Corporatism and wants to build a nation that is at least trying to maintain some Christian values?

[Mister Cowboy]

It is getting quite heated here. I guess I should step in to remind everyone that we are all brother and sister Catholics here and we shouldn't hate each other even if we do have different opinions. In the sight of God we all belong to one big family so maybe it would be good to cool things down. So, what do you say?

Am I my brothers keeper?  </sarcasm>

Wait a minute, I remember you! The other day... I asked how were you and... you didn't reply. I know talking to strangers is a bit shifty but that time I just wanted some company! You can still make it up to me by having a chat with me right now though. So, how about it? We can talk about anything under the sun.

[clau clau]

Charlie Rose: Sir James Goldsmith Interview - 15.11.94