In the heady days of the bid for the 2012 Olympics, the people of east London were told that there would be jobs aplenty building the stadium. But the cynics were right: the promises were empty...
Building the Olympics: where local people come last
WORKERS, DEC 2007 ISSUE
In November this year households in east and southeast London received through the letterbox the latest issue of "Your Park", promising latest news from the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA). Under the heading "Job opportunities for local people" we find...not job opportunities, but training being offered.
That's the Brown message as applied to the Olympics: not jobs, just the so-called opportunity to be trained for them. Read further down in the leaflet and you can get an idea of the scale of the ambition here: the Learning and Skills Council will invest £300,000 in support for a facility to deliver training in construction skills over the next two years for..."over 190 students"! That's around half a per cent of the expected 10,000 construction workers who will be building the site.
Open door for migrant labour
The London Olympic Games of 2012 exemplify the consequences of an open-door policy to migrant labour. Part of the original (and vastly underpriced) bid was the idea that it would bring "regeneration" to a run-down area of London, with lots of work for local workers.
The London Civic Forum mildly suggested in 2004 that there should be a requirement in construction contracts for the Olympics for 30 per cent of the workforce to be local. Of course, nothing of the kind has happened.
One of the many promises made originally by the bid team and the London Development Agency was to look at setting up a construction academy. The agency then announced an investment of £9.5 million in local employment training, with £3.5 million of this for construction. But as an article last year in New Start magazine explained, "the construction academy will now be a web-based virtual academy, with the construction training money expected to go into existing colleges". Effectively, nothing.
"One of the promises we had was that energy and resources would be dedicated to training east Londoners up for these jobs," said Neil Jameson of the work empowerment charity the Citizen Organising Foundation in July last year. "In our opinion, nothing has happened."
Instead, employers – and the government – have looked abroad.
The Olympic site: clearing the ground...for the cheapest possible labour.
Photo: WorkersFast track from Poland
In October 2006, the Construction Industry Training Board decided to set up an office in Poland to "fast-track" migrant workers into Britain. The idea: to run a pilot scheme, then extend it to draw in builders to work on big projects such as the Olympics and the London Gateway.
Is there a skills shortage, or is there another aim? Listen to Bob Blackman, construction sector national secretary for the TGWU section of trade union Unite and an employee rep on the Board: "This has been driven by government. They are the building industry's largest client. If they don't have migrant workers they will face a far higher bill."
Listen, too, to business analyst Kevin Davey, from Hackney Enterprise Network, speaking in May this year: "Lots of people fear there will be a serious shortage of skilled construction workers in London from this year onwards, that wages in the industry will rocket, and that small local firms may start to lose their workers to bigger companies."
Rocketing wages? That's not something the government wants to see. But Davey adds: "Fortunately this isn't happening, or at least not yet. The influx of workers from eastern Europe, particularly Poland, has filled the gap. Polish workers have become a mainstay of the building trade over the last two years, ever since Poland and seven other east European countries joined the European Union in 2004."
It's often said that migrant labour is simply filling jobs that British workers don't want to take up. That's certainly not what's happening in construction, says Bob Blackman from Unite, quoted in the Manchester Evening News on 13 November. He said that British construction firms offered just 7,000 apprentice placements last year – despite applications from 50,000 people. That, he said, was a consequence of industry getting used to "buying skills off the peg".
Olympics "on the cheap"
And in July this year, Alan Ritchie, general secretary of the construction union UCATT, said, "There is a growing fear that the ODA and the major Olympic contractors are trying to build the Olympics on the cheap, by employing large numbers of migrant workers on self-employed contracts [and] paying them far less than they would have to pay British employees...Companies using bogus self-employment are highly unlikely to train apprentices."
UCATT is campaigning against the decision by the ODA to allow contractors to recruit self-employed workers, which it says will lead to widespread tax avoidance and suck in bogus self-employed migrant labour to the detriment of opportunities for local people.
Supply and demand
In October this year, Workers published an article examining the effect of the large increase in migrant workers on the economy, particularly in relation to wages. The overall conclusion was straightforward: the increase in the supply of labour is leading to a decrease in its price – in wages. This is true particularly for unskilled work. The detail can be read at www.workers.org.uk/features/feat_1007/migrate.html.
Nothing has changed since October – except, of course, that the government has admitted that it has hopelessly underestimated the number of migrants.
It's a subject many in the trade union movement, and particularly in the TUC, want to avoid. Instead, they repeat the government mantra that the free movement of labour is good for Britain.
They need to ask themselves why they back a policy enshrined into EU law by Margaret Thatcher and supported by every employer and neoliberal apologist in Britain – and abroad – and championed by the Wall Street Journal.
So here's a quotation to think about, from Professor David G. Blanchflower, Dartmouth College, US, and a member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, which sets interest rates:
"Rising labour market slack, which has occurred in the UK since mid 2005 has likely reduced worker's bargaining power as has a rising fear of unemployment. The presence of highly productive workers from the A10 [the central and eastern European countries recently admitted to the European Union] who are prepared to work for relatively low wages along with associated increases in actual unemployment are what has helped to keep wages down."
Here's another thought: why was Britain the only large EU country to let citizens of the new member states work without restriction when the 10 new countries were added in 2004?