I have Polish employees and whereas some years ago they nearly all fell into the group of hard working and industrious people willing to go beyond what their UK counterparts would do, irrespective of pay, many of the next generation are as bad as their UK counterparty, in that they are lazy, unreliable and entitled.
No doubt the childhood their parents had was harsher than the benefits driven utopia in the UK but as with UK people, the new generation is a generation of weaklings, feeble and lacking both backbone and moral fibre.
Immigration on this level was economic. I heard figures of 4x to 10x wages in the UK and they could not believe the benefits largesse afforded them. But they worked hard and some are good friends with me today and we continue to work together. Of the younger ones I have hired, not one lasted the course.
They went home because the poor economic conditions which forced them to leave in the first place had improved. Even before Brexit, faced with stupidly high property prices in the UK, many Polish people had started to return. Brexit just gave them another reason to reconsider their future in the UK.
I personally look back to the lunacy of the Bliar government from 1997 which put half the country on tax credits whilst magically creating a million "jobs" to collect this tax and redistribute it. Though not an employer at that time I suspect this helped to push down wages or at least stop their rise because the benefits system, Tax Credits, would pay out on top. Add immigration willing to work for lower pay levels around the same time and there was little impetus for employers to raise wages until forced to do so by a mechanical minimum wage.
I don't agree with minimum wages but I acept it as otherwise people could be exploited beyond acceptability but it does kill all wages in the range 101% to 150% or even 200% of minimum wages, which are held back.
However, we're a generation on since Bliar the Liar came to power with his arsewipe sidekick Gordon "Goldfingers" Broon and still we have the bastard son of Tax Credits in Universal Credit; not too far named from Universal Income is it ? Far easier to change than "some animals are more equal than others" !
Can we pay cleaners, shop counter staff, etc. effectively the current minimum wage people around £15 an hour ? No, we cannot but we might have to and just as the late 1990s saw an opportunity for employers to keep wages low, then the 2020s might go down in history as the decade when all this was reset.
In or around 1997 I was working in a bar where the pay just crept over £2 an hour, it previously being 1.96 or something. There was certainly no shortage of people wanting such a job. According to the Bank of England's inflation calculator, that £2 should now be £5.18 but thanks to the minimum wage, it is now £9.50 or nearly double the inflated figure. An imprecise tool of course but food for thought.
Check how prices in the UK have changed since 1209
www.bankofengland.co.uk