In terms of people I dislike, there are few who register quite as high on the scale as Jamie Oliver. Not content with being just a TV chef (people who I personally blame for wasting hours of my life with dull programming) he then went on a health fascism crusade in the battlefield of school meals, which resulted in those of us who took packed lunches being banned from having even cereal bars, whilst those with school lunches continued to get ice cream for desssert. Dessert with lunch! It seemed like an appalling imbalance to my 10 year old self, anyway. Then Oliver became the public face of Sainsbury’s, my least favorite supermarket. He is a hero of middle class foodies. In short, that man caused many a childhood injustice, and represents so many things that I cannot forgive him for.
So I still don’t understand what led me to read a newspaper article about an interview he gave to Good Housekeeping. I knew it would make me mad, and I knew it would not be worth getting mad over. Nevertheless, I did. Jamie Oliver, the millionaire chef, says that European immigrants make better workers than local British folk:
“The average working hours in a week was 80 to 100. That was really normal in my 20s. But the EU regulation now is 48 hours, which is half a week’s work for me. And they still whinge about it! British kids particularly, I have never seen anything so wet behind the ears! I have mummies phoning up for 23-year-olds saying to me, ‘My son is too tired’. On a 48-hour-week! Are you having a laugh?… I think our European immigrant friends are much stronger, much tougher. If we didn’t have any, all of my restaurants would close tomorrow. There wouldn’t be any Brits to replace them.”
I hate to bring up the ‘R’ word, but for an employer to be saying this is simply racist. As the British have benefited from progressive government and unionisation under the postwar settlement, we do have a sense of entitlement. We should expect, after working hard over a six day week, or a series of ten hour shifts, a good wage and some time out of the workplace. Eastern Europeans, who do not have such a cultural memory of workers being treated fairly by employers, will be more attractive to exploitative restaurant owners.
That is not something to celebrate. Productivity and longer hours are far from intertwined. A good relationship with your employees it what counts. After all, Germany, praised by both business and trade unions as a model economy, has a shorter working week and higher wages than Britain. Why? Because firms and business people respect those they employ, and benefit from loyalty as a result.
To return to Oliver’s comments, he has either publicly bemoaned a large number of his employees, or he has an overwhelming majority of foreign-born workers (excluding local applicants). In either case, he is victimising people for the crime of having been born in this country, and that is intolerable. And hypocritical for that matter: I doubt he’d welcome his children working 100 hour weeks or being excluded from jobs by bigoted employers who assume that they are lazy because the happen to be British. I doubt Oliver himself would have become a multimillionaire TV chef if he’d been left to languish on unemployment benefit in his 20s because his Britishness made him automatically “wet behind the ears”.
Businesspeople always have a multitude of complaints about the quality of British jobseekers. Some of them are fair, and should be resolved through the education system. For example, as somebody who is still in the education system, I am not surprised that many school leavers lack essential numeracy and literacy skills. But if employers imagine that the public will allow them to continually disadvantage our young with prejudicial employment practice, they are mistaken.
