The Times:
Brexit is about to give us a problem with this, though. Karl Marx was right: wages won’t rise when there’s spare labour available, his “reserve army” of the unemployed. The capitalist doesn’t have to increase pay to gain more workers if there’s a squad of the starving eager to labour for a crust. But if there are no unemployed, labour must be tempted away from other employers, and one’s own workers have to be pampered so they do not leave. When capitalists compete for the labour they profit from, wages rise.
Britain’s reserve army of workers now resides in Wroclaw, Vilnius, Brno, the cities of eastern Europe. The Polish plumbers of lore did flood in and when the work dried up they ebbed away again. The net effect of Brexit will be that British wages rise as the labour force shrinks and employers have to compete for the sweat of hand and brow.
In spite of what economists like Robert Reich like to admit, and pundit Chuck Todd freely does without realizing what he's saying, is that the old "Americans won't do that job", or in this case, the British, simply isn't true. Britain's reserve army of workers was in Poland, and the U.S. all over the globe but particularly in Central America. COVID dried that supply up, and US wages rose.
Some, at least, of what we are seeing in terms of inflation, while inflationary, is actually caused by wages adjusting to their natural level. Economist always like to maintain this isn't true, but the actual experiment on it shows it is, in fact.
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