The Daily Mail of the UK, like the rest of the British media, had been very unhappy when Ratan Tata criticised the work ethic in the UK. The Tata Group chief was talking from his experience of Jaguar Land Rover and Corus, two companies he had taken over. Headlined the Mail: “British workers are lazy and unwilling to go the extra mile, says Indian billionaire steel chief as he axes 1,500 jobs from UK factories.” The controversy tapered off when Tata clarified that he was talking about managers, not workers. Also, he was talking about former managers in his UK companies and not the current lot.

But The Mail on Sunday kept the pot boiling with a “survey” of Indian-born Tata managers. Its research staff tried to contact them in the middle of a working day. Reported the newspaper: “In each case requests to speak to the chief executives of his businesses — including Jaguar Land Rover, Tetley and Tata Steel — were turned down because they were said to be either unavailable or abroad.” The headline: “British bosses lazy? After Indian tycoon attacks UK work ethic his OWN bosses fail our test.”

The Mail likes to take potshots at everybody, so its new target is the British worker. A September survey says that the welfare state has brought so much comfort to the unemployed that many prefer to live on the dole rather than work. Other statistics show that in 15 years, the number of UK households in which no one has ever worked has doubled to 297,000. Unemployment benefits take care of them. In the meantime, immigrants are taking over the jobs. Nine out of 10 new jobs created last year went to foreign nationals.

If you want to shout and scream about foreigners stealing jobs — as US President Barack Obama has become so practiced at doing — you have to create a situation in which the locals want to work. Jobs are moving to China and India not because you are getting cheap labour but because workers and managers there are willing, in Tata’s words, to go that extra mile.

What are the sorts of jobs that are going to foreigners? Most of them involve manual labour, the sort of thing the indigenous population would not touch. You can put all sorts of restrictions on foreign workers coming in, but you will have to lift them sooner or later. You won’t get British and American household help. So you have to turn to the Polish and the Mexicans.

This is not just a western phenomenon. If you look at a rich state like Maharashtra, you will find that the bais are a disappearing species. Housemaids now come from Jharkhand, Orissa and even West Bengal. The bigger influx is from Bangladesh; several localities in Mumbai and Delhi have become mini Dhakas.

What happens to the people who would have been maids in an earlier generation? Some, of course, are still maids — higher wages, weekly holidays and even informal pension benefits. Others are no longer working; one salary can support the family. Yet others are getting into the organised sector in jobs such as retail. You don’t need much education for that and the necessary skills can be easily taught. Besides, the workforce finds a retail job vaguely downmarket, throwing the arena open for those who have never held an organised sector job before.

And, at the other end of the spectrum, you will find the job snobs like the British. Look at public sector bank employees. Look closer at the employees of Maruti agitating at Manesar. They all want more without doing anything more. They would love to sit at home on an allowance that includes free bidis and biscuits. The dole in the UK is adequate to fund their beer and ciggies too. That is the worker’s paradise.

THE INVASION OF THE UK

The Daily Mail of the UK inserted ads for 10 fictitious jobs to verify the truth of the statement that the British weren’t interested in working and immigrants were capturing available jobs. The highlights:

A 25-hour-a-week cleaning job paying £10 an hour that was advertised in London attracted in excess of 225 applications. Of these, just 17 were from British workers. The remainder were drawn from individuals living in this country but who originated in one of 41 countries across the globe.

Romanians and Poles were heavily represented. But so, too, were workers from further afield — from Nepal, Brazil and China.

A kitchen job in Manchester attracted 46 applications of which almost two-thirds were from foreign-born workers.

The foreign applicants appeared eloquent and intelligent; most stated a determination to work hard and to get on.

Source: Adapted from The Mail Online