Working Class Hero
Things are starting to settle down in Edinburgh and I am a few days closer to liberty. I have only five shifts left at my terrible job and I’ll soon depart for London. I’ve heard only bad things about London since my arrival and it will be interesting to see what it’s really like, I suspect it’s like here except much dirtier with different accents, and I would wager that the workers rights situation is even worse.
In my opinion, the United Kingdom is making a big mistake when it comes to labor policies. The UK is among the wealthiest of nations, yet the people here can still be forced to work over 50 hours a week with no extra compensation. The whole institution is ridiculous and is only going to get worse.
An interesting phenomenon is taking place here. There has been a massive influx of Polish workers, who now have the rights to work here because of the European Union. The Polish economy is not comparable with the UK’s, so many Polish people come here to find work and earn the ever-expensive British Pound. Unfortunately, the result of this circumstance has been overwhelmingly negative for everyone involved. On one hand, it seems that many British citizens have had no problem taking advantage of eager Polish workers who will work the worst jobs under the worst conditions. While this is good for the managers and owners of businesses, it is overwhelmingly negative for Polish nationals and the average citizen of the UK.
Because there are now so many Polish people working so many terrible jobs, the British government, under pressure from the business community, has become even more reluctant to adopt more strict workers rights. The result is that hardworking Polish people are being taken advantage of, and the average person in the UK has to live with the burden of having no concept of workers rights. On the whole it is a lose-lose situation. I myself have been a victim of this situation for the past three months (and I’m Canadian), and I can only hope that for the sake of the worse off, that the British government wakes up and fixes this situation by adopting more robust workers rights.
People of power
Nothing much to say today, went to work last night, going to work again today. 20 hours in two days… no overtime pay. Workers rights do not exist here, I’ll probably be doing 80 hours a week. People don’t seem to understand what living should be… embedded below is an interesting clip I stumbled upon. I think it speaks volumes, and although I am no anarchist, it is still amazing and inspirational.
