Worse, if capital can move freely and labour can’t then wages will be suppressed.
The UK imports capital – must do, we run a trade deficit. So, we gain more capital to add to the labour we’ve got. Labour doesn’t get to move – sure, he’s over egging that it cannot rather than just less – therefore there is less labour here.
So, the UK ends up with less labour and more capital. How does this suppress wages?
Half a second! The UK imports labour – most of the increase in population over the last couple of decades is from net migration.
@john
Comparison is to the counterfactual where Britain retains more or less full labour mobility with the EU. Relative to that counterfactual, it seems Britain will have lower labohr mobility especially for low-paid work.
@ MBE
Thanks for the explanation.
‘if capital can move freely’
He proposes that it not move freely? Let me guess . . . HE gets to control it.
So he has trouble with English as well as economics: It’s depressed, not suppressed.
@ Dennis
This is a quote from Murphy. So some of us thought he might actually *mean* suppressed.
MBE,
“ Comparison is to the counterfactual where Britain retains more or less full labour mobility with the EU. Relative to that counterfactual, it seems Britain will have lower labohr mobility especially for low-paid work.”
In theory, but is there any evidence that Brits used the opportunity to any great extent, especially the working class?
Working class are too busy and too financially stretched to use freedom of movement. The only people who benefit are the wealthy.
“The essence of globalization is: labor is commoditized as mobile capital is free to roam the globe for the lowest cost labor. In contrast, labor is far less mobile, and unable to shift as fluidly and frictionlessly as capital to exploit scarcities and opportunities.
Neoliberalism–the opening of markets and borders–enables capital to effortlessly crush labor. The social democrats, in embracing open borders, have institutionalized an open immigration that shreds the scarcity value of domestic labor in favor of lower cost immigrant labor that serves capital’s desire for lower costs.”
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com.au/2017/01/the-collapse-of-left.html
@BIND
The reverse, I meant the market in Britain for low pay work that many foreigners are willing to come here to participate in, not the market for low pay work in Poland which essentially zero Brits were ever interested in mobilising to!