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Group issues 12-point plan calling for stricter immigration rules for care workers, students and refugees
Rishi Sunak is facing demands from “red wall” Conservative MPs to slash the number of overseas care workers, foreign students and refugees allowed into the UK in time for the next election.
The MPs from the 2017 and 2019 intake, who call themselves the New Conservatives, have issued a 12-point plan to cut net migration to Britain from 606,000 to 226,000 before the end of 2024.
A cap of 20,000 on the number of refugees accepted for resettlement in the UK.
Caps on future humanitarian schemes such as the Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong schemes should the predicted 168,000 reductions not be realised.
Implementation of the provisions of the illegal migration bill, which it is claimed would lead to a reduction of at least 35,000 from LTIM.
A raise in the minimum combined income threshold to £26,200 for sponsoring a spouse and raising the minimum language requirement to B1 (intermediate level). This should lead to an estimated 20,000 reduction in LTIM, the MPs claim.
Making the migration advisory committee report on the effect of migration on housing and public services, not just the jobs market, by putting future demand on a par with labour requirements in all studies.
A 5% cap on the amount of social housing that councils can give to non-UK nationals.
Raising the immigration health surcharge to £2,700 per person a year.
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Lasting labor victories depend on coordinating diverse strategies and building the relationships to sustain them.
You’ve probably heard that everyone is “paid what they’re worth.” Don’t buy it.
According to this mythology, workers at the bottom are “unskilled” and don’t deserve more than what they currently earn.
Minimum wage workers at McDonald’s are paid what they are worth in the so-called “free market.” If they were worth more, they’d earn more.
By the same logic, the CEO of McDonald’s is worth his multi-million dollar compensation package.
The notion that people are paid what they’re “worth” is by now so deeply ingrained in the public consciousness that many who earn very little assume it’s their own fault that they don’t earn more. That they simply lack the skills they need to be paid more.
But there’s no such thing as unskilled workers. Only underpaid workers. Their productivity — that is the value of what they produce — has been growing for decades. The problem is that their wages haven’t kept pace with their productivity.
The “paid what you’re worth” mythology also lures the unsuspecting into thinking nothing can be done to change what people are paid. It’s simply the way the market works.
Meanwhile, according to this same view, CEOs who rake in tens of millions and Wall Street traders who rake in hundreds of millions, are simply being paid what they’re “worth” because that’s what the market has dictated.
Rubbish. The “paid what you’re worth” fairytale ignores power and disregards policies that have made inequality skyrocket. Like the demise of antitrust enforcement, which has given big corporations the power to set prices, make record profits, and reward their CEOs unprecedented compensation. This fairytale ignores the attacks on labor unions that have reduced union membership from over a third of all private-sector workers in the 1950s to just 6 percent today. All of this resulting in a massive shift in power and wealth from workers to owners.
Those at the top justify their staggering wealth, and they’re “worth,” three ways:
The first is trickle-down economics. They claim that their wealth trickles down to everyone else as they invest it and create jobs. Just wait for it… But as we know, wealth at the top has soared for decades and nothing has trickled down.
The second is the “free market.” They talk about market forces beyond their control. But remember, markets are created by rules. These rules don’t exist in nature; they are human creations. The political power of the wealthy has let them change the rules for their own benefit — busting unions, monopolizing industries, and reaping big tax cuts.
The third is the idea that they’re superior human beings. Sure, they may be talented but this doesn’t justify the staggering amount of wealth they are now taking home. Nor does it justify the amount of wealth they will pass down to heirs. The biggest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history will occur over the next 25 years as the richest 1.5% of Americans hand down roughly some $36 trillion dollars to their children and grandchildren. That doesn’t make those heirs superior. It makes them lucky.
The reality is there’s no justification for today’s extraordinary concentration of wealth at the very top. Or for how little people are paid at the bottom.
The “paid what you’re worth” myth has proven to be a cruelly effective way to put the blame on workers for not getting ahead — while giving the rich and powerful cover to rig the game for their own benefit.
It is distorting our politics, rigging our markets, and granting unprecedented power to a handful of people while millions of Americans struggle to get by.
Don’t fall for it.
By Rebecca Farrington, Louise Tomkow, Gabrielle Prager, and Kitty Worthing.
Healthcare professionals are increasingly expected to be hardy and ‘suck it up’ to survive in complex and demoralising workplaces. As NHS clinicians, we saw staffing shortages and limited resources firsthand during the COVID-19 pandemic. These experiences magnified our scepticism about the onus on us, as individuals, to be ‘resilient’ as a solution to both the workforce crisis and wider societal problems.
Our paper ‘In critique of moral resilience’ describes the responses of NHS staff faced with navigating COVID-19 and caring for one of the most disadvantaged groups in our society – people seeking asylum housed in contingency accommodation. The staff we interviewed provided a social commentary on the state-sponsored neglect of vulnerable migrants in the UK. We don’t overlook this, but we focus on healthcare professionals’ understanding, responses and negotiation of their roles in this ‘Hostile Environment’.
Resilience was clearly important to staff for self-preservation, but so was an ability to see the limits of a biomedical approach to social suffering. The concept of moral resilience helped to unpick this but was not enough to describe the ideological changes and challenges to systems made by staff using their new insights. They did put up with the difficult bits of their work, and we describe how they survived. However, these coping actions alone did nothing to change the status quo in the political and social systems causing the underlying health problems. Some staff we interviewed made positive changes in the lives of the people seeking asylum through activism to improve their health and wellbeing. We found that the concept of resilience failed to capture these important moral actions: advocating beyond the clinic, beyond just doing their best on the job.
The popular focus on resilience is here to stay in much of our work and home lives, but we encourage caution in using it as a broad-brush solution to complex problems. Healthcare providers who see and yet continue morally problematic care in the name of resilience might be thought of as complicit in social suffering. Does moral resilience just promote acceptance of the status quo, even when it feels unbearable? What cost does this fixation on resilience bring to both care providers and patients?
Reflecting on our work in clinical medicine, research, and medical advocacy, we recognise that some of our most effective improvements to social conditions have been through collective action and joint resistance. In times of increasing moral outrage, such as against the UK government’s illegal migration bill, this feels a more appropriate response than just sucking it up in the name of resilience in the hope that we will survive.
Authors: Louise Tomkow1, Gabrielle Prager1, Kitty Worthing2, Rebecca Farrington1
Affiliations:
The post Does our preoccupation with resilience mean we must tolerate the morally intolerable? appeared first on Journal of Medical Ethics blog.
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