Anyone watching "The Day the Immigrants Left"?

[JollyPirate]

Not showing the British workers in a good light at the moment.

The British ones get so angry all the time - they all seem to take it so personally when anyone points out they are doing it wrong.

ooops, he gave up! Why has he not got any staying power. Giving up is the easy way out

Anything challenging and they're off

Fuck! What a shocker! The brits don't work as hard! i can see the headlines now

This makes me so angry! I was waitressing at 16 part time. It astounds me that grown men don't have the wherewithal to cope!

Dean the builder Dude is beaming! THat is nice

it's not hard to realise why they've been unemployed for some time is it?

"has since moved away from the area" yes i expect rather a lot of people do. hence the perceived imbalance between indigents and incomers.

The big dude, do you think he has learned anything?
Tall skinny in the tatter factory is making me cry!

I am really sad that there were no jobs for the guys at the factory.

So are we righting "them" off?

I wanted to slap the bloke who said he couldnt understand the Portugese guy. He didnt want to... nobody else had a problem.

And then he had the cheek to say they were being singled out for the packing mistake as they were the newbies.

He has shown himself to be a complete arse.

The factory said they would employ them if anything came up.

What most of them seemed able to do was to accept responsibilities for their own shortcomings, and to ask for advise on how to improve their efficiency, accuracy, etc. They looked for someone or something else to blame.

I saw this kind of attitude with the men (aged 17+) I worked with in the prison I worked at. When doing thier release plannign it could be a nightmare.

I went back to UK for the weekend, and commented to dh that on the ferry the signs were in English, French and Polish. Now German or Dutch I could understand, but Polish....? Must be a big part of the clientele, thinks me. Then I realised that all the staff on the ferry are eastern european.

I was born and bred in Dover. Jobs on the ferries were sought after. They were a huge local employer. There's a big chicken and egg scenario here I think.

Everyone has to cut costs. Employer can find people to work for less, so wages drop. What was once seen as a good, well paid job now pays crap, so the locals don't see these jobs as attractive any more. Slack is then taken up by immigrants who will work for the lower wage.

And we expect (me included) to pay less and less for the service and so it goes on.

i am praying that my colleagues watched this they make me absolutely rage with their racism at work. ive been diagnosed with a problem with my jaw and its tension - cos im always biting my fricking tongue so hard. they are horrible to immigrants and it pisses me off so much.

yesterday i felt so down about it. we had a young latvian gent come to register and they actually refused (probably illegal but that doesnt stop them)
followed by a british nomark fresh out of prison who they all fawned over and felt sorry for....i actually said my piece for once but i paid for it later as my supervisor was a bitch to me all afternoon.

cant wait to leave this horrible job.

IME of the immigrants i have worked with, they have had or seen a very hard life, and learnt to live on very little.
where they havent had the option of social security. so competition for all jobs is immense.

so they tend to be very motivated and make the most of opportunities that come their way.

even if they dont like the job, they use it as an opportunity to learn skills and languange and use it as a stepping stone to something else.

having nothing (i.e. the dole) in their countries, to fall back on they have learnt to work through any difficulties at work and maintain a good attitude ensure that they are employable.

What a bunch of whingers that lot were. It was really embarrassing but certainly true for part of the population. Why go out and work when you can sit on your backside and get money for nothing?

Hmm.

Sad thing is though I do know people who have been unemployed for a long time, who have been chewed up by the system and the job centre does nothing but offer unstable agency work. None of them on here tonight - just the lazy ones.

By the end I was feeling a little bit sorry for some of them. There was a lot of posturing and bluster, especially from the young guy in the restaurant and the two in the factory, but a lot of low confidence underneath.

Still I bet they'd be just the sort to go into McDonalds and take the piss out of the staff there...

DH said something quite relevant, which was, that by definition, immigrants are special in their get up and go and desire to change their lives. So you are not really comparing like with like when you are comparing unskilled immigrants with long-term unemployed.

< trying to be very fair >

interesting programme - I think the whole indian restaurant thing was a bit foolish, clearly an 'english' worker is not going to perform as well, but the other jobs were valid as comparisons.

Re the construction workers, I found it interesting that was the area where there seemed to be the least criticism of the UK workers, and it was also given the least time in the programme

Am not sure I agree with the comments in the programme that contractors pay uk & non Uk workers the same. My Ex is in the building trade & has worked alongside a number of Russian/Baltic states labourers, the majority of whom he describes as fast, but shoddy workers who cut every available corner. The reason most were employed on large projects was speed and cost. It's more cost effective for a contractor to have 10 migrant workers on a job for a week for say £500 a head, then the week after pay 2 skilled british guys double that the following week to 'tidy up' their work, than have the skilled labour on the job from the word go, for which the contractor would have to pay more, and it would probably take twice as long to get the job finished.

Overall, not a good advert for UK workers. Nor indeed for the education/further ed system. Why do we have appear to have so many entirely unskilled members of the population when supposedly there is now greater access to education and training than ever before?! as for the poor boy who couldnt tie a tie but at least he had the grace to be !

Vicar - unbelievable when the guy in the factory wanted to change the portuguese guy's name because he claimed to not be able to pronounce it. That's exactly what happened here in the '50s and '60s

also, the reference to there being jobs in the job centre - at least one of the vacancies seemed to be part time, i think 15 or 16 hours per week on the description. financially i can easily see it would not be it for people to come off/reduce their benefits purely for part time work.

I feel really sheltered, I know no-one who is a thick as s*t as some of these British "workers", how did they think they were going to look on national TV, didn't they care? How they smirked as they were told they had eraned almost nothing and cost the farmer money. Jeeeez they make me fume, well done immigrants for keeping this country going. How hard is it to bend over and pick at the same time. I used to pick strawberries in the summer for a short while. I realised I was in the wrong type of picking scedule, I had a "boss" woman who enforced a tea/fag break because we were being paid by the hour and shouldn't pick more than she wanted us to - I swapped to being paid per punnet, along with some keen Cambridge maths student, leaving the fat, lazy, thick as s*t, domineering bully and her coven behind in the dust, I was a speedy picker......

This was quite a few years before Eastern European young people moved over to East Anglia, I never met any immigrant workers while strawberry picking back then.

Oh god this program made me shudder.

This was what it was like for my poor immigrant parents back in the day, I remember only too well. They left this country two years ago after having worked their socks off for 35 years here and raised a family with no help/benefits etc. Even at the end of their working lives alot of attitudes hadn't changed and they were frequently told they were drains on society and to go back home.

And back home they did go, having earnt a lovely modest house in England, beautiful flat in Europe, three children through university. Every day I admire them more and more.

I watched most of this i do think that we were painted in a bad light,i think any job is difficult in its early days and i think the people that did go,did give it a go.

Dh asked me why was it that the young lad just didnt want to do it ,I think its a generation thing,our children are shielded from the hard manual work,I remember spending time at my nannas in suffolk,it wasnt a holiday as such more a time for my mum to earn money on the fields picking strawberries and potatoes,we went with her and our little hands picked the goods too,nowadays the children would be more likely to sit around on a gameboy or watching a dvd on a portable player etc etc.

The immigrants do work very hard though and i think its because they want 'better' and are prepared to work to do it.

It was an interesting programme although im not convinced it was portrayed in the true sense.

They will always find "extreme" examples otherwise it makes boring tv. They have an agenda at the beginning of course