Discussion
Then globalisation kicked in bigtime in the 1990s. It quickly became obvious - to anyone paying attention - that a foreign worker didn't need to emigrate to your country to end up doing your job. Your boss could export your job to them wherever they were, and did. Taking advantage of lower (or no) minimum wage, and weaker (or no) unions, in places like China, Mexico, Bangladesh and Indonesia.
It's hard to believe Brexiteer anti-immigrant nonsense is taken seriously on the left, anywhere.
(3/3)
"So how it that actually supposed to then connect up to ... serious, sober, here is a way that we might find ... might build a bridge out of this moment, to somewhere better."
#DuncanGreive, 16 Sept, 2025
https://thespinoff.co.nz/podcasts/the-fold
(2/2)
"[Charlie Kirk] was described as anti-immigrant, and that's true, but the way that he described his anti-immigrant stance was ... the more that you have vast numbers of people coming in to compete with you, the more that suppresses wages. That's a doctrinaire left-wing perspective in a lot of countries now."
#DuncanGreive, 16 Sept, 2025
https://thespinoff.co.nz/podcasts/the-fold
Which ones?! This is bog standard, 20th conservative anti-immigrant cant, and it's wrong on at least 2 levels.
(1/?)
Prior to globalisation, the 20th century left were against this zero-sum attitude on the basis of international solidarity among workers. Arguing that what pushes wages down is not the number of workers seeking employment in a country, but things like unionbusting, and scabbing. Anything else that reduces the leverage workers have when bargaining with bosses over pay and conditions.
(2/?)
Then globalisation kicked in bigtime in the 1990s. It quickly became obvious - to anyone paying attention - that a foreign worker didn't need to emigrate to your country to end up doing your job. Your boss could export your job to them wherever they were, and did. Taking advantage of lower (or no) minimum wage, and weaker (or no) unions, in places like China, Mexico, Bangladesh and Indonesia.
It's hard to believe Brexiteer anti-immigrant nonsense is taken seriously on the left, anywhere.
(3/3)
"This nonsense that we live with, whereby we're just not even acknowledging the tension between the sort of chaos, information libertarianism of the internet, and this old, structured [media] world. And the fact that one is clearly eating and destroying the other."
#DuncanGreive, 2025
https://thespinoff.co.nz/podcasts/the-fold
Firstly, it's kind of weird to claim that nobody is acknowledging this. Discussions about the state of the media industry and the future of journalism mention it *constantly*.
(1/?)
To give some context, what Duncan is riffing off here is the power of the courts to gag journalists with name suppression and other publication injunctions. While having no power to discipline what people gossip about on social media.
This too is an old discussion. There were court cases over it, where Cameron Slater was taken to task for what he published digitally on his Whale Oil blog;
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10619680
(2/?)
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