A lot of people blame (or attribute) our recent prosperity and the development of the big bubble we're suffering the burst of now, to the import of cheap immigrant labour to buoy up what was already a failing econonmy. If we hadn't had Poles working for minimum wage, we'd have felt this years ago.
But I suspect there is another influence - automation of clerical work by IT systems. At my time at Barclays, I personally automated the dull repetitive paper-sifting tasks for dozen, perhaps hundreds of people. The rise of web shopping has done away with the need to pay people in local towns etc to staff expensive shops. All the back end systems for big companies we so dilgently write do away with the need for armies of expensive pen-pushers.
It's all our fault.
But I suspect there is another influence - automation of clerical work by IT systems. At my time at Barclays, I personally automated the dull repetitive paper-sifting tasks for dozen, perhaps hundreds of people. The rise of web shopping has done away with the need to pay people in local towns etc to staff expensive shops. All the back end systems for big companies we so dilgently write do away with the need for armies of expensive pen-pushers.
It's all our fault.
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