http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2091-1807167,00.htmlThe Sunday Times
- Ireland



The Sunday Times October 02, 2005

Comment: Brenda Power Immigrant workers deserve far better



The best thing about our new-found multiculturalism is the opportunity it
gives us to interact and communicate with people of many races and tongues.
Just as well, then, that we Irish have always known instinctively how to
make ourselves understood to foreigners of all hues: the trick is to speak
louder and louder until they catch on. In my local building society last
Wednesday morning, a female employee was using this particular form of
Esperanto to extract personal details from a young Polish man who came in to
open an account. I know he was Polish, even though I was standing in a queue
at the far side of the large room, because the poor man evidently believed
he was required to respond to her bawled-out questions at a matching volume.
I know his mother’s maiden name and I know, as does everyone in the branch
that morning, that his take-home pay is €215 a week and that he has an
address in a fashionable Dublin 6 road. Which made me, and doubtless others
in the queue, wonder what sort of kip he must be renting to allow himself
enough money to eat and still open a bank account to save from his princely
pay.
I don’t think this man was singled out for disrespect just because he was a
foreign national with basic English. The teller’s attitude had the ring of
equal opportunity contempt — it’s the sort of thing any low-income, poorly
educated customer unfamiliar with the requirements of a modern banking form
might encounter. And yet it is unlikely he was either as ignorant,
ill-educated or deaf as the bank assistant clearly assumed. His English, for
a start, was far better than her Polish, he had the initiative to come to
this country in search of work and, miserly though his earnings were, he’d
got himself a start. He was obviously planning to use his money sensibly,
perhaps with the intention of going home with a nest egg or maybe, because
this was a building society, hoping to raise a deposit for a property here.
He was, in other words, the very model of the sort of immigrant worker that
Ibec and Congress and the government have been telling us we need in their
hundreds of thousands: intelligent, responsible, resourceful and keen to
integrate. He was also, most likely, living in squalor, earning peanuts and
missing home, and in that regard he was the very model of the modern
immigrant worker in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.



A few months ago, Seamus Brennan wondered aloud why it was that 100,000 new
EU citizens had been able to move to Ireland and find work in the recent
past while we still had 150,000 unemployed people claiming state benefits.
The answer, of course, is that these people have little choice but to take
on the jobs that the Irish, with the safety net of the social welfare
system, are either unwilling or unable to do. They get here and find the
streets aren’t exactly paved with gold, but if the option is going back to
Poland or Lithuania, where the job opportunities are far worse, they take
what they can get. They leave children and spouses behind, they work all
hours, they live in grotty bedsits and cheap hostels and, just as Irish
emigrants to America and London did in the bad old days of the last century,
they take refuge in the society of compatriots and alcohol. And, through no
fault of their own, their sole contribution to our cherished
multiculturalism is their low-cost labour and their ethnic food stores.

This country is a very long way from being truly multicultural — it is still
a predominantly Catholic, Irish, Fianna Fail-voting, GAA-supporting,
meat-and-two-veg-eating society. The best we can hope for, in the years
ahead, is that those immigrant workers who come here to work can afford to
stay here, live here, educate their families here, vote and join the gardai
and stand for election here, educate our palates with their cuisine and our
souls with their literature and music, and enrich and complement our own
indigenous culture with garnishes of their own. They’ll never do that,
though, while economic circumstances confine them to miserable, squalid,
home-sick ghettos and the intellectual deprivation of menial jobs and life
on the minimum wage.

Last week the Polish edition of Newsweek magazine reported that, far from
being the promised land, Ireland was a “living hell” for many Poles, who
arrived expecting to be able to pick and choose jobs and instead found
themselves sleeping rough and living on charity. While the Polish Embassy
here suggested the article was exaggerated, a spokeswoman did concede that
up to 10% of the Polish community in this country — perhaps 10,000 people —
may be in difficulties. Some have become depressed, mentally ill, alcoholic
or suicidal and, according to the article, their misery is exacerbated by
the “biting remarks from Irishmen who seem not to love us as much as we love
them”. And being asked to reveal your pitiful take-home pay to a bank full
of strangers can’t be much fun, either.

Groups like Ibec and Isme have been telling us for years that we need these
workers to keep our economy ticking over. And we are dutifully reminded to
be welcoming and tolerant and culturally receptive, so that we can all live
happily ever after. Yet the same pressure groups that repeatedly urge us to
welcome immigrant workers are also the ones that fiercely resisted an
increase in the minimum wage, claiming it would hamper our competitiveness.
Increasingly, the evidence is that nobody gives a damn whether the
immigrants feel welcome, nor has anyone the slightest interest in Polish art
or Latvian music — these people are simply economic units to plug labour
gaps where the Irish won’t oblige. We don’t give a hoot if they drink
themselves stupid and miss their kids and fight and sleep in bunk-beds at
six to a room for €75 a week, so long as they continue to staff the cheap
restaurants and the 24-hour production lines and the dodgy building sites
without complaint. And when they’re injured, or imprisoned, or killed, their
families back in Poland are left to live on less than €50 a month social
welfare. Now at least there are plans to relax restrictions on social
welfare benefits to migrant workers in this country, so that those who have
worked here for some time, and find themselves out of work, will be able to
qualify for assistance instead of having to wait two years before becoming
eligible.

It’s time we challenged the suspicion that all of these people are coming
here primarily to sponge off us, and that they should be packed off home
without delay if they fall through the cracks. For a start, allowing these
immigrant workers to remain in low-paid misery can only exert downward
pressure on wages and working conditions, making the gap between the work
and pay available, and the willingness of Irish people to do it, all the
greater. And that, in turn, will result in growing unemployment and,
ironically, growing labour shortages as the essential immigrant population
sees less and less to attract it to Ireland. So there’s a benefit to all of
us from paying them properly and treating them with respect.

Even if we don’t expect temporal reward, we might at least engage that
predominantly Christian nature of our society, and start viewing these
immigrant workers as people with rights and needs and legitimate
aspirations. If we require them to work and live in this country in order to
help maintain our standard of living — at a cost, incidentally, that is 18%
above the European average — then we ought to expect to cut them a slice of
that standard of living. We will never build a society that is stable, never
mind fair, by obliging desperate people to live in unpleasant conditions so
as to keep us in the style to which we have become so very attached.