We need honesty on the pitfalls of freedom of movement

Gideon Ben-Tovim (Letters, 16 November) describes as a “false notion that free movement across Europe has ushered in a regime of cheap labour and the undercutting of wages”. I wonder how many low-paid workers this university academic knows personally. My late husband was a construction worker who wore himself out and ruined his health doing hard, and often dangerous, work for many years. I know that wages went down after the influx of cheap labour from eastern Europe. But, far from this making him anti-immigrant, my husband never blamed immigrants for this, but greedy employers who have recruited workers en masse from eastern Europe. The villains here are the employers, not the immigrants who, like British workers, are just people trying to make a living.

Of course, free movement is great in many ways, but it is dishonest to refuse to acknowledge that there is a downside – and this is easily remedied: pay all workers a decent living wage, restore collective bargaining, and stop chasing the cheapest labour for the maximum profit in a race to the bottom.

In a TV discussion on immigration, a restaurant owner made the following revealing comment: “Immigrants have a good work ethic that British workers don’t have. Do you know, some of my workers have three or four other jobs too.” So having to do several jobs to make a living is seen as desirable instead of the exploitation it is. What next? Children sweeping chimneys?

There is a return to a really nasty class snobbery such as we haven’t seen for decades, all the worse for being wrapped in fake virtuous “pro-immigrant” rhetoric which simply masks a smug selfishness by those who benefit from this cheap labour.
Jill Rooney
Ashtead, Surrey

• Contrary to what an emeritus professor of sociology may choose to believe, there are multiple academic studies showing that uncontrolled EU immigration lowers wage rates at the lower end of the labour market. Immigrants will do many jobs for the minimum wage while a British worker would expect a differential to be applied, and an energetic foreign 18-year-old with no family commitments within 1,000 miles will often be favoured over a rights-conscious British 40-year-old who seeks time off to care for both her ageing parents and children.

As progressives we need to escape from the echo chamber of comfortable and endlessly repeated untruths if we are to persuade voters outside the hyperliberal metropolitan hubs to trust us with their communities and their insecure livelihoods.
Christopher Clayton
Waverton, Chester

• It is easy for your correspondents to rail against a dinosaur like Len McCluskey from the safety of their ivory towers and the protection of their qualifications. I too favour the free movement of labour and there can be no doubt that we need overseas workers, but McCluskey touches on a truth that explains why the many poorer voters are moving to the right. When workers go for jobs offering low wages and long hours they find are in competition with desperate eastern Europeans living in houses of multiple occupancy, who have been sold lies about the reality of the UK, and are willing to accept this state of affairs in the expectation that things will get better and they can move on. Experience of austerity has given the UK workers fewer illusions and they are unwilling to accept these jobs.

The only way the needs of both groups can be satisfied (either in or out of the EU) is for stronger laws on wages and working conditions that are rigorously enforced for the protection of all workers.
Andrew Ruff
Bedford

• Jeremy Corbyn (Corbyn advances case for liberal immigration regime post-Brexit, 18 November) must know that bringing doctors and nurses from abroad to fill the gaps in the NHS must leave equivalent gaps in the countries from where these doctors and nurses come. Countries such as Poland or Portugal, India or Ireland are in as much need of such talent as the United Kingdom.

Advocates of freedom of movement of labour cite internationalism to support their argument. But the very core of internationalism is respecting and supporting other nations and most importantly doing them no harm. Freedom of movement does just that. In the colonial days, Britain plundered the natural resources of other countries. Today we are invited to plunder a far more precious resource, the human resource.
Fawzi Ibrahim
Trade Unionists Against the EU

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