Last week the Conservative Party floated a policy proposal to make companies report how many foreign workers they employ and - if press reports are to be believed - "shame" companies judged to employ too many.
The media reaction this proposal generated showed that I wasn't alone in instinctively finding this idea morally repugnant - but then YouGov published a poll that suggested the majority of voters instinctively approve of the idea ("
By more than two to one the public support government proposals to make businesses publish how many foreign workers they employ");
So why does a proposal that appals many of us appear to find favour with the majority?
First we should try and be clear what the proposal actually is (even if those answering the YouGov question may not have been). This is not as straight-forward as you might imagine.
The headlines seemed clear enough: "
Firms must list foreign workers - plans to shame companies..."
Interestingly you won't find any of these words in Amber Rudd's conference speech (>
full text of Amber Rudd's conference speech) - the only relevant words I could find are:
we will shortly be consulting on the next steps needed to control immigration [...] examining whether we should tighten the test companies have to take before recruiting from abroad [...] The test should ensure people coming here are filling gaps in the labour market, not taking jobs British people could do. [...] So I want us to look again at whether our immigration system provides the right incentives for businesses to invest in British workers
Fairly run-of-the-mill stuff. I could argue with the phrase "jobs British people could do", but there's certainly no mention of lists of foreign workers or shaming companies. So where do those words come from? I can't find any formal government announcement (>
Gov.uk/announcements) and nothing from the Conservative Press office (>
press.conservatives), so it seems we have to rely on papers' interpretations of press briefings.
I make no apology for being forensic about this. When reactions to the proposal include claims of
xenophobia and racism, we should be clear about who has said what and to whom.
The
independent helpfully quotes directly from "a briefing sent afterwards" (emphasis is mine)
In a briefing sent afterwards, it was made clear that other measures to be considered would be, “whether employers should have to set out the steps they have taken to foster a pool of local candidates, set out the impact on the local labour force of their foreign recruitment and be clear about the proportion of their workforce which is international, as is the case in the US."
That same independent article states
Businesses may even be “named and shamed” by being forced to publish what proportion of their workforce comes from overseas.
Those quotation marks really matter: we must surely infer that either in the written or spoken briefing from the Conservative press office, those words were used?
The
Times article doesn't explicitly refer to the briefing but clearly theirs is the same source (again emphasis is mine)
Under the proposals, to be included in a consultation paper, businesses would have to “be clear about the proportion of their workforce which is international”. It is understood that this would apply to non-EU workers initially but could be extended to all non- British workers after Brexit.
Businesses would be expected to publish the figures for each site where workers were based. Details such as whether the rules would apply only to companies employing a certain number of staff have yet to be finalised.
The Times article goes on to say;
Hitting back at critics in an interview with Today [..] Ms Rudd said she had been careful to ensure her speech did not to fall into the “trap” of stoking racial tensions.
Ms Rudd has a point insofar as it's clear that the words that caused the biggest headlines and most outrage were not in her conference speech; but it's also clear that the official press briefings given were much less circumspect.
The fact that the independent places "named and shamed" in quotation marks and that the Times refers to plans to "shame companies" suggests that this language was used in the briefing.
[The "must list foreign workers" in the Times headline looks like the work of a sub-editor to me, because revealing how many are employed is technically not the same as listing them.]
Enough of the forensics: Amber Rudd may have been careful not to deliver the inflammatory words herself, but she (her department, her party) are clearly responsible for getting the "name and shame" idea out there, along with the basic proposal that companies declare the proportion of their workforce which is international.
Of course all of the nuance above is lost by the time you get to public perception and the YouGov poll question to which the majority appear to agree
1: "do you support or oppose government proposals to make companies report how many foreign workers they employ "
Now let me explain why I think this is a
really awful idea.
I've made the point that the "list employees" headline is misleading, but the process for getting to the proportion figures requires employers like me to create real lists with real names of real people on them. Under these proposals I will be required to create lists of non-British employees. You don't have to be the keenest student of history to see why this is a deeply unsettling thing to be asked to do.
References have variously been made to "foreign recruitment", "international workers", "foreign workers", "comes from overseas" and "non-British workers". Each of these terms is open to interpretation and raise questions which - frankly - I don't think we should be having to ask (e.g.
UK Home Office won't say if Irish people will be exempt from controversial list of foreign workers).
It's important to note that it is of course already
illegal to discriminate at work on the basis of nationality (or
race, religion, gender, age etc.) - companies can't pay non-British workers on a different pay-scale to British workers. We already have a visa system which controls who can and cannot work in the UK and for how long. If a government wants to change those rules, they should do so explicitly, not via some dodgy back-door shaming exercise (which by the way appears to encourage discrimination).
Under these proposals we would be asked to segregate our employees into two categories: British and non-British. We would be explicitly encouraged to discriminate between these two categories - having "too many" non-British employees is something we are to be ashamed of, apparently.
This focus is clearly meant to be on hiring decisions, as ilustrated by the supplementary YouGov question (which 60% of respondents agreed with):
There's a major flaw with this question of course: unless we start cloning people, "all else about two candidates for a job" will never be equal. What this is really suggesting is if you're struggling to choose, don't bother thinking harder and forming your judgement based on the candidates' qualifications and your perception of their ability to do the job, judge them instead based on whether they're British or not. Whether the respondents realised it or not (anybody involved in recruitment knows the premis of the question is flawed), this is simply encouraging discrimination based on nationality.
But if we're to "name and shame" companies for employing "too many" non-British people, would the impact stop at recruitment? When performing staff reviews or facing difficult redundancy decisions, how can employers not be expected to be influenced by the consideration that having "too many" non-British employees is considered a source of shame for the company?
True Story: As an employer I've had to go through the extraordinarily difficult and soul-sapping process of making people redundant. When you go through that process you have to work out the objective selection criteria on which you decide who stays and who goes (tenure, attendance, performance reviews, disciplinary record, etc.). I hope I don't need to say we didn't have "British or non-British" as criteria on our list. I remember clearly how a Polish warehouse worker with an outstanding employment record wept when she was told she wan't going to made redundant - she told me she just assumed that the non-British workers would be first to go. I was shocked that she'd think that. It sickens me to think that the prejudice she feared would exist may be edging its way toward being encouraged through government policy.
Aside from the moral arguments, there are solid practical reasons why any actions that discourage migrant workers are a bad idea (and knowing you're on a list of an employer's non-British employees certainly doesn't seem like an employment perk). As this blog has covered before:
- As people live longer, the proportion of our lives when we aren't contributing to the state but are instead benefiting from it increases (> Two Types of People)
- The strong weight of evidence is that immigration has a positive impact on public finances, that immigrants make a positive fiscal contribution (> Immigration and the EU referendum)
Politicians are generally shy about saying this (although to the SNP's credit, they're not): we need to encourage foreign workers to come here, to work and to generate taxes (to help the state look after our increasing older population).
But these practical considerations shouldn't distract us from the core issue here: context.
These proposals are made in the context of a winning Brexit campaign that shamelessly played to the xenophobes among us. I'm certainly not suggesting that most Brexit voters were xenophobic, but you can be pretty sure that all xenophobes were Brexit voters. To pretend that the EU referendum hasn't stoked the flames of narrow-minded nationalism would be disingenuous; to make proposals to appease those who seek to stigmatise non-British workers is downright irresponsible. And passing the inflammatory sound-bites to the press by holding them in a large pair of tweezers doesn't absolve Amber Rudd of responsibility either.
That this could be argued to be building on previous ill-judged sound-bites like Gordon Brown's "
British Jobs for British workers" is no defence - two wrongs don't make a right.
My Scottish nationalist friends really hate me making this point, but the rise of nationalism in its various guises is a common theme here. Ironically this point was made by the SNP's erstwhile spin-doctor-in-chief, Kevin Pringle, when he tweeted "we're certainly living in a Nationalist state now"
Nobody likes to be spooked by their own reflection, so it's perhaps understandable that Mr Pringle acts as if the flavour of nationalism that drives these proposals bears no relationship to his beloved Scottish Nationalism. I was even told on Twitter that
"at least Scottish nationalism is pure", which to be honest didn't comfort me greatly.
The two brands of nationalism we've been witnessing in the UK over the last few years are different, but they share a common, grubby thread. They both focus on"othering" - narrowing the definition of
us and seeking to define a
them to blame for all our woes.
Of course the source of Pringle's barely concealed glee is that this plays into the hands of the Scottish Nationalists. Continued grievance rhetoric from the SNP fuels an English back-lash that runs from calls for English Votes for English Laws (EVEL) to a rise in the mirror of Scottish Nationalism, English Nationalism. The gap between us grows and the SNP's dream of separation from "them" seems closer day by day.
But if the SNP are reaching for the YouGov poll to show how different we are when it comes to attitudes to foreign workers, they'll be disappointed. With all the usual opinion poll caveats required
1, SNP supporters are if anything more likely to argue for prioritising British workers than Labour or Lib Dem voters;
From the same source, SNP voters also appear more likely to
strongly support the proposal than either Labour or Lib Dem voters
So it seems Mr Pringle may have to swallow the fact that those who favour Scottish independence are - on this thorny issue at least - not so different from the rest of the UK, they're just different from Tory and UKIP voters (which, despite some of the more simple-minded protestations you might hear, isn't the same thing at all).
One last cross-cut of that YouGov data shows 50% support for the proposal in Scotland (vs. 59% UK-wide). I don't think a 50:50 split in Scotland really justifies the virtue-signalling on this issue that we've been hearing from the usual SNP suspects.
So
Vive la similarité? Well no, not in this case. I'd rather we were bound by a clear shared desire to welcome and treat foreign workers as we do any others, rather than roughly half of us having an apparent shared desire to discriminate against them.
Is it too much to hope that when people think this through a little further, the consensus will shift to condemning this as being a truly awful ideas?
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