Archive: Tesco going East

First appeared at the Luikkerland website, 14 March 2011

In a story that appeared on the Daily Mail website over the weekend, it was revealed that Tesco is recruiting in Slovakia to fill 238 trainee buyer and trainee merchandiser vacancies in London branches. Tesco excused itself by claiming that there were no suitable British candidates; a spokesman said: “we make every effort to recruit from local communities, but we can’t always fill vacancies”.

The story provoked a large number of the website’s users to make remarks in the comments section regarding their dismay. Many said that the story was contrary to their personal experience. One contributor wrote “over the past couple of years whilst working elsewhere I constantly applied at Tesco only to be told no vacancies!” Other people wrote of not being able to find these jobs advertised in the UK, and others to point out how the Slovakians would be paid lower wages for the level of responsibility than Britons would. In general, there was a sense that Tesco was not being honest in the justification of its actions; one perceptive contributor wrote “this is just propaganda against the unemployed. Cameron and big business wants you to believe that the unemployed deserve to be attacked”.

Further investigation suggests that these online critics all have a point. There seems to be a degree of collusion between government and business to make the EU work best for profiteering. In 2004 and at the time of EU expansion into Eastern Europe, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) predicted that “the arrival of migrant workers from the EU accession states will help to relieve upwards pressure on wages, without creating downward pressure”. In other words, European immigrants would work for lower rates. In the case of the Tesco roles, UK store managers’ salaries range from £26,000 to £60,000 a year, and the average wage in Slovakia is £7,500. For such a candidate, the lower end of the UK scale is already more than 3 times as much as they would have normally expected to earn. In 2004, CIPD stated an expectation that “there will also be large numbers seeking routine employment offering rates of pay well in excess of what they can obtain at home”.

The opportunity to profit from the situation seems to have been a driving motivation for British business in its welcoming of EU expansion. Notably, in 2002, FoodAndDrinkEurope.com reported that Tesco’s CEO, Sir Terry Leahy, had “come out strongly in favour of expanding the [European] Union into the east”. Additionally, in 2006, the Independent newspaper reported that:

Three quarters of employers said they believed European enlargement two years ago had been good for business, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation said.

“Employers said they valued migrant workers filling vacancies in low-skilled jobs, especially in the building, hospitality and agricultural sectors.”

This practise of filling low-skilled vacancies with immigrants is something that seems to come straight from the guidance given by the CIPD in 2004, which said at the time:

Language barriers may prevent some [EU-immigrants] from undertaking front-line roles in those parts of the service sector where good customer relations are essential. But they will be available for shelving and packing jobs in shops and supermarkets as well as manual jobs in manufacturing agriculture and horticulture.

In order to take advantage of the phenomenon of willing minimum-and-low-wage slaves, British business needed to find a reason not to employ Britons, and this manifested itself in casting Britons in the role of lazy ne’er-do-wells. This construct then justifies the recruitment of personnel from eastern European countries. As the Independent reported in 2006, “employers told the JRF they found that migrant workers were reliable compared with UK workers, whom some described as ‘lazy’.”

The final ingredient in the stitch-up is a propaganda exercise to make Britons believe that they are indeed lazy, and that the country would not survive without immigrants. This comes from both the media and politicians. The Mail’s headline for the story mentioned at the top of this piece is “Retail giant Tesco recruits store bosses from SLOVAKIA after British workers shun supermarket jobs”. And a report in a recent copy of the Independent claimed that “many employers, including hospital managers, are struggling to fill vacancies because of tough new visa restrictions”.

The most notable contribution to this propaganda from a politician was issued in 2010 by Iain Duncan Smith who condescendingly claimed that Britons would have to “get on a bus” to find work.  Duncan Smith was taken to task for exaggerating the number of jobs available in the British economy – with fullfact.org claiming that there are probably only half the 900,000 that he claimed there were. Duncan Smith did, however, seem to recognise that 2.5 million unemployed people would not find employment in such a job market, but denied immigration had anything to do with it. He also acknowledged that over half of all new jobs go to foreign nationals, but said, “this isn’t about immigration. It is a simple question of supply and demand. We had a supply of labour – the unemployed. We had a demand for labour – all the new jobs. But we couldn’t match them up, so we had to import people.”

Given the evidence that British business actively looks abroad for low-wage labour, and the CIPD gives guidance that foreign nationals are ideal for keeping costs down, it is actually quite obvious that there is no skills mismatch between most jobs in the British economy – which are low-skill and low-wage – and the British worker, and for Duncan Smith to say so is disgraceful. However, it is to be fully expected by a loathsome anti-British politician looking to bring about full EU integration by sleight of hand.