The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
Polls, politics and policy ~ The lump of labour fallacy and shortages of petrol, food, cars, timber and Christmas stuff
Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their Seasonal Lag from their Indian Summer.
This week we look at the petrol crisis and how it relates to labour shortages, and we examine how all of this relates to what economists call the ‘lump of labour fallacy’.
And of course, there’s Charlie’s Attic, where you can fill up on memes and get a full tank of internet miscellany. This week we discover the history of the wheeled suitcase and as a nod to events at this week’s Labour Conference, some tips for dealing with hecklers.
Scarcity and migration
With petrol shortages in the headlines and a whole list of sectors experiencing a scarcity crisis, this BBC article lists the products which have become harder to come. This includes everything from timber to Christmas turkeys.
Issues like COVID-19 have played a role in this. But the ‘B’ word (Brexit) does seem to have been one of the central factors behind the present issues, with a lack of staff in certain roles – from meat-packing to lorry-driving – being the root cause of many of the shortages.
“Industries are now competing with each other for a dwindling pool of workers,” a spokesmen from the British Meat Packers Association explains in the above piece. “The current labour crisis has seen workers in strategically important sectors like food manufacture and social care being enticed away by other sectors that can afford to hike wages 20% or 30%.”
The government have tried to remedy this with a ‘temporary visa system’ for lorry drivers in the run-up to Christmas, but the idea has not taken off. This radio call from a Polish lorry driver gives a sense of why. In the clip he explains that the migrant workforce is not a tap that can be turned on and off, drawing an unflattering parallel between the treatment of migrant workers and the ‘Dog is for life’ advertising campaign.
Without wanting to wade too far into the Brexit quagmire, we wonder if ‘lump-of-labour’ ways of thinking about our economy have fuelled the present situation (no pun intended!). The idea that unemployed UK residents would step in to fill the gaps in meat packing or fruit-picking seems to epitomise this notion. So too the idea of temporarily allowing in migrants to fill a gap – rather than building up longer-term cycles of settlement and growth.
There are many other reasons for the present shortages, of course. But the present crisis does seem to be an indictment of overly literal ways of talking and thinking about the economy.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, the tardy turkey at the end of our timely round-up:
