Labour musings

Some waking musings about the supply and demand for labour, prompted by learning about the bus fares from central Plymouth to Yelverton.

Yelverton is a village some way to the north of Plymouth, at one time a suburban retreat for people who had done well out of business in Plymouth, with much of this business being ultimately rooted in the naval base and its dockyards. So a good number of suburban villas of various sizes. Top left in the snap above, with the northern outskirts of Plymouth bottom left. Dartmoor proper off the top.

At least one of the larger of these villas has become a care home, with lots of new bits tacked onto the original buildings. The sort of place which might once have been staffed by people being released by changes in agriculture, but which now draws in people from much more varied backgrounds, many of them people of colour. My starting point this morning being learning yesterday that a lot of them live in central Plymouth and commute daily out to Yelverton. Which can be done by bus, with the catch there being that the single fare from Plymouth to Yelverton is of the order of £10, hugely more than we are used to paying on buses in and around London. A number which sounds big relative to the hourly wage of a care worker.

Another such villa was to be found at Dousland, a little to the east of Yelverton, once a home for those with special needs, then closed by the Care Quality Commission, now an independent school for those with special needs. See reference 1.

From where I jumped to the mental hospital business, of which there was once a lot in Exminster, south of Exeter. Here again, the people staffing up these hospitals came from varied backgrounds, with a lot of them being released by more or less local agriculture and another lot coming over from Ireland, a place which until recently had plenty of surplus labour for export. Along with Wales and Scotland. A lot of the staff in the Exminster hospitals lived locally, a lot of them in hospital houses on very low rents.

Then one has the various smaller islands around the world where the supply of land and work was very limited and which generated surplus labour. So before the invention of mass tourism, the Canary Islands used to export labour to the Americas. While in the 1960s and 1970s lots of people came over from Mauritius to work in our mental hospitals. Nearer home, the island of Jersey sucked people in to staff up its tourist industry. If memory serves, the first wave was from Ireland and the second from Portugal. I dare say that now we have a third wave.

Then certain countries in the far east provide most of the labour for the world’s merchant shipping and for the world’s cruise liners, sometimes characterized in these pages as floating care homes. I believe the Philippines is one of them.

Which led me to wonder where the countries, now apt to moan about there being too many tourists, thinking here of Spain, Italy and Greece, get the labour needed for all their hotels and restaurants? Do they, like us, have pools of residents who don’t want to do the work themselves, but who resent the arrival of foreigners who do?

All very complicated. No doubt most of our better universities have whole departments and small herds of professors devoted to these matters. Not to mention various politicians, mostly rather less savoury. 

From where I associate to the Office of Population, Censuses and Surveys, which, in the 1970s, also included people who took a serious interest in such matters. At that time, despite my lefty background, I kept my nose in my computer and did not trouble myself with them. An office which has long disappeared inside some larger organisation, some larger statistical operation. See reference 2.

PS: amused to read at reference 3 that China is having a retaliatory pop at Canada for dumping rape seeds. Not the oil you cook with, rather the seeds that you plant to make the plants that grow to make the seeds that you make the oil with. See also towards the end of reference 4.

References

Reference 1: https://www.heatherbridgeschool.co.uk/. 

Reference 2: https://www.ons.gov.uk/. 

Reference 3: China to launch anti-dumping probe into Canadian canola seeds - Gloria Li, Financial Times - 2024.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/05/saatchi-one.html.