Amusement

[andrewducker]

Name the following business.

It has a workforce of 39,000 outside the UK, with just 6,000 staff in Britain.

Its biggest business is chewing gum.

The focus of much recent investment has been Poland, to replace UK production.

And 50% of the business and management came from the takeover of the confectionery company Adams from an American drugs business some five years ago.

Who is this faceless, heartless global conglomerate, which opportunistically shifts its capital and people to wherever the financial returns are greatest?

It's Cadbury.

From

Comments

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

There'll be a lot fewer staff in the UK by the time Kraft have finished with it.

[andrewducker]

In which case I will be happy for whichever lucky workers do end up with jobs.

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

Whereas my glass will be half-empty for the workers who are redundant.

[andrewducker]

Oh, it's always sad when people lose jobs. But it's a fact of life. Nobody has a right to a particular job, and I have a loathing for nationalist idea that British jobs are better than the jobs of any other country.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Indeed. The common notion is that people need jobs. I disagree. Stuff needs to get done, and we apportion that to people. If less stuff needs to get done -- hurrah! Let's all take an extra day off and let the robots do things.
(Of course this necessitates either people being paid a living wage, or not having money at all...)

[andrewducker]

We only have jobs for things robots are shit at. When robots can do things we want, more cheaply than people can, those jobs cease to exist...

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

But employing more British people would mean more workers paying income tax which I think would be beneficial to the British economy. Nothing to do with nationalism, just a healthy regard for the economy in which I live.

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

You beat me to this post.

I do not think that a British person has more right to a job that a person of any other nationality, but I live in the UK, and self-interest means that I want there to be jobs for people who live here like me to do (whether they are British, Polish, Indian or whatever).

I believe our society works better if there is work for everyone who needs or wants it. It will work less well the more people are excluded from work. If enough of us don't have work then things which I think are vitally important will disappear - the NHS, state education, the welfare state - they only exist because enough folks (again, of any nationality) work and pay their taxes here.

It's unrealitic to say, there is this amount of work to do and it doesn't matter who does it - that would be true if we didn't have capitalism.

[andrewducker]

This works much better for me if "our society" includes the whole world, and not one small island.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, living in a fantasy land doesn't make for good economic views. We live in Britain and that will not change in our lifetimes (unless you move, I guess!).

[andrewducker]

I don't live in a fantasy land. I live in a real world, with open borders for competition, where people aren't banned from selling their work all around the world, where international laws and treaties prevent us from engaging in protectionist behaviours, and where huge numbers of studies have shown the advantages of international openness over engaging in a "Fuck you, you can't play with our toys" attitude.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

But in which having a strong national economy is still an advantage, as opposed to your fantasy, in which it is not.

[andrewducker]

I'd like you to quote the line where I said that having a strong national economy is not an advantage.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

It means that I have a higher chance of being able to find work because there are more jobs created by the higher amount of money the scientific community will receive as a result of a government unafraid to spend money because of a healthy economy. Thus, I think that until the above is different and spending in certain areas isn't correlated to economic health, I'll just have to disagree...

[andrewducker]

But why do you think I'm against the economic health of the country? As I pointed out above, economic opennness is correlated with healthiness of the economy.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

I don't, I think you're living in a hypothetical situation in which an American company taking over a British one resulting in British job losses somehow doesn't negatively impact on the British economy.

[andrewducker]

I'm talking about the bigger picture - where sometimes we lose jobs to them, sometimes they lose jobs to us, and overall the number of jobs and size of the economy are both improved by the freedom to move companies, jobs and money around.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

I think that you're right in that respect but I still don't think the Cadbury takeover, in itself, will not have a negative effect on our economy.

[andrewducker]

I think you're right about this case not being good for our economy, at least not in the short run.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

Don't you love violent agreements?

[andrewducker]

Absolutely! Bastard!

Actually, one of the reasons why I'm happy to have these kinds of discussions with people I know is that they do so frequently turn out to be agreements of some kind - where the confusion is over semantic things. The other major one is that I trust people on my friends list to be acting in good faith - you wouldn't be arguing with me unless you thought I was wrong, and had some kind of reasoning behind that, you're not just picking fights for the hell of it.

[matgb]

More people employed in palpably inefficient jobs means lost opportunity costs.

People tied up in crap jobs means they're not able to go off and do better jobs elsewhere.

For better, don't interpret that as better paid, or better for them, merely more efficient economically.

Which is why, for example, the typical Brit is twice as well off in 2007 than they were in 1977, after taking into account inflation, and we were at almost full employment (so much that we were heavily importing labour to make up the shortfall).

We, as an economy, are better off with robots and poorer nations doing the crappy lower end factory line jobs, freeing us up to do better things.

(nb, I state all of this despite having been effectively unemployed for about 18 months now and living at below the poverty line).

I like having a healthy regard for the economy in which I live. Which is why I spend a lot of my free time reading lots about economics.

Ricardo's theories of comparative advantage remain true to this day. They just need interpreting properly. I like buying goods from poorer countries, it makes us all better off, imports, after all, are what makes us rich.