Britain’s Poles go on strike tomorrow to protest the widespread anti-Polish xenophobia across the country, which is literally everywhere. There are about one million Polish people in Great Britain, and many sectors of the economy depend on them, so in theory they could hold the country to ransom by striking. But they wont, and this is the beauty of open orders.
Firstly, they won’t because so many eastern Europeans work in areas where they have so few working rights. That’s why big business likes them, and why many working-class natives resent their arrival.
So if your Polish worker goes on strike, you can just sack him and hire a Romanian for even less; that is how our forward-looking, globalised labour force works. Historically one of the reasons given for America’s relatively weak trades union and socialist movement is its diversity; workforces thrown together from different countries lack the cohesion to take on the bosses.
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