In Defense of Polish Plumbers

That's what plumbers look like, right?

(e) Three plumbers, national General Service (new posts).

Free migration in the EU means that Polish plumbers will not only catch up with French plumbers, but also with Polish bankers. Middle class people in Poland are being hit by the increased cost of the services of skilled workers, such as plumbers, and also of the less skilled, such as decorators, and the highly skilled but low paid, such as doctors.

Every single year fewer electricians, fewer carpenters, fewer plumbers, fewer welders, fewer pipefitters, fewer steamfitters.

Surgeons are the tailors, the plumbers, the carpenters some would say the butchers of the medical world cutting, reshaping, reforming, bypassing, fixing.

There were always exaggerated claims that bringing in the new members would be a costly affair, just as petty and narrow prejudices blemished the willingness to open up Europe s borders for Polish plumbers.

By contrast, labor in the EU is largely immobile. Despite populist speeches about the threat posed by Polish plumbers, net migration flows between regions are generally insensitive to differences in unemployment rates among regions.

Second, inflows of new workers bring substantial benefits as well as losses in France, which suffers a shortage of some 6,000 plumbers, there must be plenty of households that would be pleased to find someone qualified to do repair work.

I believe that women and girls today have to partner in a powerful way with men with their fathers, with their sons, with their brothers, with the plumbers, the road builders, the caregivers, the doctors, the lawyers, with our president, and with all beings.

The unemployed comprise not only construction workers, but also ancillary workers, such as real estate brokers and bankers, as well as all those who work on houses, such as plumbers and electricians. So the job losses extend far beyond those in the construction industry.

They are, Young argued, confined, even condemned to lower level jobs, with no chance to rise to eminence, or even to a comfortable position of responsibility. According to Young, those who have at least some talent will form a pioneer corps of plumbers and builders and other skilled workers.

It is one thing to back the European project when the idea is to bind Germany so tightly to France that never again will anybody think it worthwhile to wage a war over what language is spoken in Alsace Lorraine. It is another when the European project means that French workers face competition from Polish plumbers, Romanian farmers, and Turkish shop clerks.

For example, during the referendum campaign in France for the European constitution, the Polish plumber became a symbol of the threat that European integration was supposed to pose to French workers standards of living. But the impact of free migration (when allowed) on French plumbers incomes is in fact minimal, not least because of the smallness of the new member states compared to the whole of Western Europe.

Though Americans tend to lump Nixon s violations of civil liberties together under the heading of Watergate, much more was involved than the break in at Democratic Party headquarters and the subsequent cover up. The participants in those events included the Plumbers, a personal secret police established by Nixon and so named because one of their tasks was to eliminate leaks of information that the White House did not want to disclose.