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The British Are Coming for Your White-Collar Job

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Re: The British Are Coming for Your White-Collar Job

#51
post #28

As someone who lives in the UK it's pretty depressing that we somehow seem to have succeeded in mismanaging ourselves into being a low-wage economy. The 20% or so depreciation in the pound as a result of brexit, and the subsequent futher devaluation as a result of the chaos of Boris -> Liz Truss -> Rishi Sunak definitely played a part in making the UK relatively attractive for firms from the US say, but there are als…

What’s Brexit got to do with anything? If you look at a graph of the devaluation of the pound, it’s a pretty linear decline from 2014 onward. That was two years before the referendum. The UK actually seems to be stuck in more or less the same malaise that’s hit Italy and France, which is failure to recover from the 2008 crash. If you look at a graph of GDP per capita, all three countries have been totally stagnant on…

Not sure which graph you are looking at but Google Finance shows 2008, the Brexit referendum and Liz Truss giving the Pound/Dollar exchange rate a good kicking, after each of those events it didn't recover. This is the reason UK has been attractive for US and Canadian investors.

https://www.google.com/finance/quote/GBP-USD?hl=en&window=MA...

The Euro for example has held it's value since the culmination of the debt crisis around 2014.

https://www.google.com/finance/quote/EUR-USD?hl=en&window=MA...

Re: The British Are Coming for Your White-Collar Job

#52
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn’t that all set in motion by Thatcher? Especially the deteriorating economic situation for the entirety of the UK outside of London?

In 2007 it was decent. I feel like we got hit hard by the 2008 crisis and never really recovered. Not just the UK either but most of Europe too. Back then the USA felt a little bit wealthier, now it feels light-years ahead.

Worth remembering it's quite natural for the US to be wealthier. It has the resources of a continent, functionally infinite land, massive energy resources, the thousands of miles and an ocean away from any threats. Like, of course a country like that is gonna be rich.

Re: The British Are Coming for Your White-Collar Job

#53
There's quite a bit of slippy argumentation in this article.

The anecdote about the filming of Barbie is misleading. The UK has been strongly competing with Hollywood for filming for years, as it's one of the few places in the world that has the local high-end moviemaking infrastructure to compete with Hollywood, but without the militant unions. This isn't a new phenomenon and the unions factor is mentioned near the end of the article, even though movies are presented as a new trend at the start.

Then the article goes off on a big Brexit-related hit job. They say "Sterling has lost 15% of its value against the dollar since the 2016 Brexit referendum", "For the stagnating post-Brexit UK economy..." and "The pound’s sharp drop in value". For the real currency story see my other comment but briefly the currency had been in decline since 2014, but reached its pre-referendum value about 18 months after the vote when it became clear the promised 800,000 job losses and "emergency taxes" weren't going to happen. The actual leaving of the EU had little apparent effect either, with GBP/USD being the same now as in 2020.

That makes sense because the UK economy is services-heavy and the EU single market only did anything for goods trading, not services. That's why the UK has always exported more services to the USA than the EU and why leaving didn't actually impact UK/EU trade despite what the article claims. There's a Parliamentary report that shows a graph of long term UK/EU trade (in slow decline due to the falling size of the EU relative to rest of the world) and you can't actually see Brexit on it at all, because the effect was too temporary to show up.

The WSJ also tries to blame inflation on Brexit but again, a quick check of the real charts shows that this isn't the case:

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/inflation-cpi

Inflation wandered around between the 0%-2% band that the central bank was targeting up until the economically disastrous lockdowns and associated money printing to pay for things like furlough and eat-out-to-help-out (which the US wisely did not copy). The GFC had a much bigger impact on inflation than Brexit.

Re: The British Are Coming for Your White-Collar Job

#54

There's quite a bit of slippy argumentation in this article. The anecdote about the filming of Barbie is misleading. The UK has been strongly competing with Hollywood for filming for years, as it's one of the few places in the world that has the local high-end moviemaking infrastructure to compete with Hollywood, but without the militant unions. This isn't a new phenomenon and the unions factor is mentioned near the…

100% agree. I'm deeply anti-Brexit, but out of all the EU countries, we were probably the best places to make a go at it. We export mostly services, speak the global lingua-franca (lingua-anglo?), have a great geographic position, and unlike almost every other EU country, our biggest trading partner is not in Europe.

Re: The British Are Coming for Your White-Collar Job

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also from Ireland. I think English language being their main strength, versus in non-English speaking EU countries where recruiters tend to only look locally where their native language gets spoken instead of venturing into foreign countries where they don't know the language and culture very well. The other I think is how hungry and agresive the UK is for service sector opportunities, having always positioned it's e…

It’s because inequality is brutal in the island, while the mainland is a bit more equalitarian. So was the UK up until Thatcher really. She released the Kraken of capitalism, and now the UK feels like a small version of the US, inequality wise. Thatcher’s reforms increased GDP and wealth but also massively grew the number of working poor.

Although she also massively increased the wealth of the working class by opening up more property ownership. UK wealth inequality is amongst the lowest in Europe.

Re: The British Are Coming for Your White-Collar Job

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Even the average dev salary is only say, double that average. Dev salary being double the average national salary is very good by western EU salaries. In Austria for example as a dev you earn just slightly above the national average income. I think only in the US and cheap countries like Poland, Romania, SE-Asia, etc it's normal for devs to earn several times the average national income because they're hot markets f…

Devs in my "cheap country like Poland" earn significantly above the national average income of Austria.

I know that, no need to feel insulted. I never said otherwise and that wasn't the point.

Re: The British Are Coming for Your White-Collar Job

#57
post #16

As someone who lives in the UK it's pretty depressing that we somehow seem to have succeeded in mismanaging ourselves into being a low-wage economy. The 20% or so depreciation in the pound as a result of brexit, and the subsequent futher devaluation as a result of the chaos of Boris -> Liz Truss -> Rishi Sunak definitely played a part in making the UK relatively attractive for firms from the US say, but there are als…

It's deliberate, if you read their document* from a few years ago "Britain Unchained" that was basically the plan. *I say document, it's written like it's by 6th formers who have just discovered Ayn Rand, but it is pretty short.

You're assuming that it was a plan in reality it really wasn't

the brexit vote went an unexpected way, and people had to actually figure out how to deliver the undeliverable policies that were promised.

The problem being that the people doing the promising had never actually done anything of substance outside of talking bollocks for a living.

The people doing the delivering _did_. However the probrexit side said "give me solutions not problems" followed by "no no, thats just propganda, you're the enemy of the people, I will find someone to put this moon on a stick" Thus we ended up with lord fucking frost.

The anti brexit people wouldn't take anything less than full reversal meaning that we defaulted onto something utterly shite

Now we are left with industrial quantities of diarrhoea smeared over everything, which is going to take years to clean up. The problem being that the next lot are promising not to use soap to clean up brexit. They are promising to shine it to a bright polish.

Re: The British Are Coming for Your White-Collar Job

#58

Kinda related, but why the heck are all third-party recruiters British? Every single third-party recruiting agency seems to be British

The UK recruitment industry is extremely competitive/aggressive. After Covid, they realised they could even outcompete the Americans on their home turf.

UK estate agents are also expanding abroad at an increasing pace.

Re: The British Are Coming for Your White-Collar Job

#59

Kinda related, but why the heck are all third-party recruiters British? Every single third-party recruiting agency seems to be British

I’ve wondered this too. One theory I have is that in the UK doing an undergraduate degree is a humanities subject has much higher social status than the US. This leads more of the “top” high school students to do these degrees. When they graduate they obviously need a job and recruiting works week due to needing good language and soft skills. Maybe a bs theory though :)

> in the UK doing an undergraduate degree is a humanities subject has much higher social status than the US

I'm not really sure there's much of a difference between any subjects in the UK. Like, maybe stuff like Physics is seen as better? There's a big thing against "Micky Mouse degrees", that aren't seeing as leading to a job.

Recruiters themselves are seen as one step above estate agents, which is _not_ a high status.

Re: The British Are Coming for Your White-Collar Job

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you set up your own legal entity(company) based on the financial/legal framework in your country, and bill your foreign employer for the work you do, but you're not an employee so you have no right to sick days, firing protection, etc. and have to do your own taxes.

Note that if the employer is found to be engaging in "disguised employment" then, in some jurisdictions such as the UK, they may be found liable for these things anyway plus penalties.

I know, some countries like UK, Germany, Austria, etc have laws to discourage this, but in Eastern Europe(Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, etc) this is totally legal.
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