Some Like Frogs Hot - Some Like Frogs Cold - Some Like Frogs in the Pot 10 days old
Posted on 11/06/2005 12:51:07 PM PST by lizol
Why Some Riot and Some Do Not
by Paul Belien, The Brussels Journal Friday, November 4, 2005
While Paris burns, Poland does not. Isn’t that strange? The Poles have an unemployment rate which is as high as the unemployment rates in French suburbs. Yet while “angry French youths” burn down their neighbourhoods, including their public transport buses and schools, Polish plumbers, construction workers and nurses are too busy to be angry. They travel abroad for several weeks at a time to work in foreign lands. One of the places they go to is France, where they work harder, often delivering better quality and at lower wages than French workers. Can’t the “French youths” do the same? Do not tell me that there are no plumbers, construction workers and nurses in places like Clichy-sous-Bois?
Mark Brands is a clever young Dutch entrepreneur. Last year he founded Eurostar25, a company which negotiates temporary contracts between Dutch employers and Polish workers. Four months ago Brands also opened offices in Belgium. He explained yesterday in a Flemish newspaper (De Tijd, Nov. 3) how his system works: the Polish workers remain in Belgium for eight consecutive weeks, and then have a one week holiday in Poland before returning to Western Europe. Eurostar25 guarantees its Belgian clients “well-motivated temporary workers.” Brands pays them the normal (high) Belgian wages. This allows the Poles to earn in four months what they would earn in Poland in a whole year.
Brands’ Belgian clients like the deal for two reasons. The first reason is that despite all the talk about unemployment, there are many low-skilled jobs that hardly get filled. The Poles are prepared to do jobs which many Belgians spurn. The second reason is that the Poles work harder than Belgian employees. Brands takes great care to ensure that his workforce remains “flexible.” The Poles never work too long in the same place: “If they work too long with the same group of Belgian employees, they adopt the slower working pace of the Belgians,” says Brands.
Eurostar25 is a booming business. Last month Brands opened his first offices in Denmark and Switzerland. There is a demand for well-motivated flexible and temporary workers in Western Europe. Brands now offers not only Poles, but also workers from the Czech Republic and Greece.
Anti-immigration parties take it out on the so-called “youths” in Clichy because they do not work, while the West European socialists take it out on the Poles because they do work. Two weeks ago Belgian employees of Struik Foods, a meat processing factory near Antwerp, went on strike because the management had employed a dozen temporary Polish workers through a Dutch company similar to that of Mark Brands. The trade unions crippled the plant with strikes until the management complied with the demand that no Poles would be allowed to work at Struik Foods. This was a setback, acknowledges Brands, “but the invasion of Polish workers will be impossible to stop.” The unemployed from Eastern Europe will keep coming to the West.
An obvious solution to the “anger” of the unemployed “youths” in Clichy-sous-Bois and the other burning suburbs of Paris would be to send in an entrepreneur like Mark Brands to offer them the same kind of jobs that he is offering to Poles, Czechs and Greeks. Why doesn’t that happen? Why is there no “invasion” of unemployed workers from Clichy-sous-Bois and similar places? Why do they prefer to burn down schools rather than to follow the Polish example?
Perhaps because despite the so-called poverty and destitution of which they are victims (at least according to the media), the Islamic “youths” of Clichy are the spoiled brats of the West European welfare state. Despite the media talk of “discrimination” (if there is any discrimination of immigrants in Western Europe, it is “positive” discrimination), they get the same generous welfare benefits as other Frenchmen. The West European government handouts are so high that none of the allegedly “frustrated and angry unemployed” are willing to do the kind of jobs that the Poles gladly take. The moral perversion which accompanies socialism has affected Muslims to a larger extent than it has affected people raised in the traditional Christian culture of the West with its stronger sense of individual responsibility – and even among the latter social welfarism has had devastating effects on traditional morality, which has almost disappeared.
The Poles on the other hand have lived under almost half a century of communist dictatorship, but socialism did not affect them to the same extent as it has affected the peoples of Western Europe. They remained faithful to their Catholic religion. The Western media maintain that they voted in favour of social welfarism in the last elections. But did they really?
In last Saturday’s The Wall Street Journal Daniel Schwammenthal reminds us that three things – free markets, family values and patriotism – have been the hallmarks of every successful conservative movement. When the Poles had to choose which party to make the biggest in the country they chose Law and Justice (PiS), a conservative party emphasing family values and patriotism rather than free markets, above Civic Platform (PO), a conservative party emphasing free markets rather than family values and patriotism.
Last week Alex Chafuen of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation pointed out that many of the voters who prefered PO’s economic proposals ended up voting for PiS because they disliked PO’s commitment to the European Union. “Both parties need each other and they will need to find a consensus,” Alex wrote. Unfortunately, the Polish party leaders started quarrelling over personal and personnel issues, forcing PiS to form a minority government. The new government, however, has many convinced freemarketeers in its ranks and is proposing an economic policy that is economically more sound than what many right wing parties in Western Europe propose. Unfortunately, the Poles will not get the flat tax that PO suggested, but they will at least get a simplification of the tax code of which West Europeans can only dream.
The spectacle of politics in Warsaw is as disheartening as the political spectacle in Paris, where some are trying to use the ongoing riots in Paris and elsewhere as an excuse to bring down Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s Interior Minister. But as long as the Poles are not losing their willingness to work, to create wealth, to improve their lot, as long as they realise that their future is their own responsibility rather than the state’s and the politicians’, Poland’s prospects are bright, while those of Western Europe grow bleaker day by day.
>>Why Some Riot and Some Do Not<<
I have to be in the mood, or after a nice meal and a few drinks.
These are not angry French youths, They are black African and Muslim. Polish unemployed are mostly white. See the difference?. Now you know.Of course you wont admit it.
Born in France? Doesn't matter. They are not French. You are what you do, not what you say or what you whine.
Are dogs born in France French citizens?
The big difference is that the Poles aren't Muslim.
Yep, don't need the hassle.
No, not really.
Paris rioters? Muslims. Polish discontents? Christians.
People can try and examine a myriad of possible social and economic causes but the obvious (and correct) explanation is the one that everybody is trying so hard hard to avoid entertaining. Muslims are violent and wish to destroy Western Civilization. IT IS THAT SIMPLE!!! THEY HATE US!!!
The Western world will continue to ignore this at our own peril.
What Brands is doing is very similar to the guest worker programs we used to have in the US. The workers here came from countries like Jamaica, Barbados, and Mexico.
The idea works well, because the employer (Brands in this case) has the responsibility to make sure the workers perform and that they go back home in a timely fashion.
The objection always is that foreign workers shouldn't be allowed in when there are unemployed natives, but it's a pipe dream to think that all natives really want to work (especially when they don't have to)
People who don't see those facts as true when it comes to the US usually see it when it applies to France.
I saw young Polish waiters working in Irish hotels this summer.
I was reading an article in a 1901 Scribner's Magazine about immigrants. The writer had gone down to Ellis Island to watch the examination procedure. Among the many vignettes he wrote about, two grabbed my attention.
One young Polish guy was going to be sent back home because he didn't have any relatives to vouch for him and he had no money. The inspector berated him for trying to get into the country with no means of supporting himself. He told the inspector "I don't need money, I have this, which will make me money." and pointed to an instrument case. The inspector, sensing fraud, told him to take out and play the instrument.
He did, and the whole place was rooted in their tracks as the guy played the intermezzo from "Cavalleria Rusticana" on his cornet. The Pole said that he had a job waiting for him in Massachusetts and all he needed to do was get there. The inspector passed him and paid for his ticket to Fall River.
The other tale was of a three-generation family. The young man and woman, in their 20s, were accepted, but their child had some kind of physical disability and was sent back. Grandma and Grandpa went back with the kid instead of the mother. The writer and inspector stepped outside for a break and saw the husband and wife looking around their new country in bewilderment. The writer wondered what would become of the family. The inspector said not to worry, "They will live on nothing, as they have done, and in two years, at the most, those children will send for them. They are Poles and by tomorrow they will be working on something".
Would that we had their kind coming in today.
It’s a simple question, we can find the key in the same text below:
This allows the Poles to earn in four months what they would earn in Poland in a whole year.
Poland has much lower than France, prices for food, housing, etc. (If I’m allowed to use a Russian analogy here, the street price of an ice-cream in London, UK buys 10 ice-creams in Moscow). That’s why regular French wages are top generous for Poles. Even if we’re talking about low-payed jobs of plumbers, construction workers and nurses in places like Clichy-sous-Bois.
Usually these jobs are paid below the universally accepted living standard in a certain country. Local people don’t take them up because of this simple fact. Immigrants are the factor which keeps the wages that low.
They keep locals out of work, the unemployed locals suck public money from welfare systems, busnesses pay higher taxes because of high social spending…
Go figure!
"Sounds like Poland is the Mexico of Europe, with guest workers contracted for day/week labor"
Or France is the US of Europe.
It's better to be Mexico of Europe than New Orleans of Europe.
"He contends their work ethics have been ruined by their employment with the state. "
I've seen it up close. I took a job with the state department of finance in Nashville back in the late 70's. I had previously been employed by a local bank as a programmer. I would guess that the entire department was run by ten percent of the employees who really worked. We had one guy who hung out on the street corner with his friends most of the time and got caught at it! They couldn't fire the guy because he was civil service and a minority so they just ignored him. It was pathetic and frustraing trying to get some production out of these people.
Lets be honest here. The majority of the rioters are under the age of 18...the vast majority are still in school or have been kicked out for disciplinary reasons (which they can do at age 14 in France). Alot of these kids...are demonstrating exactly why businesses don't want to hire them. The French government can hand out all the cash it wants...but the bad taste of attitude is evident...and I sure would not hire a single one of these punks for any business I owned. And I'm sure the car industry would be laughing to get a resume from one of these arsonists.
The thing is that the sum 2000EUR by itself says about nothing. That may be a small sum, taking cost of living in France into account.
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