London's Toilets - Polish Underclass Immigrant's Hilton!
Touring Poland
I've had a welcome break from the computer screen for the past week, venturing to Wieliczka's famous Saltmines and the former Nazi death/concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkeneau near Krakow to the majestic Mazurian lakes in the north-east of Poland. Surreality never escapes the world of news however and on my cyber-browsing adventures today I noticed one quite unusual item concerning Polish emigrants in London.
Media Disservice
According to This is London news portal
Polish immigrants are coming to blows for the privilege of sleeping in public lavatories at a cost of just 20p per night.
It seems like Hackney East London has been experiencing builders with their tools making use of the local comfortable lavatories to catch up on lost sleep, revitalising their bodies before they return to the ever-booming building sites that remain a key driving force behind England's economic prosperity.
Battles for Beds
Locals have reported that scuffles break out on a daily basis between the cubicle's potential clients around 10.30pm as the homeless labourers battle for the prime positions. Allegedly, cleaners who turn up at the toilets the next morning have either been refused entry or violently reproached for daring to thread on the make-shift beds.
The Real Problems
But the reporting of this problem of course ignores the fact that rental prices are exorbitant and at times beyond the reach of labourers already being exploited by their greedy bosses. Let's gain some perspective here: people only sleep on cardboard in dirty, cramped piss holes when they are pretty fucking desperate, drunk or high. So the solution is not to write stupid articles like the one linked above from 'This is London' which lacks any analysis of 'why' people have the need to fight over such living conditions.
Wake-up Call
Civic society through NGOs, the Unions, the church, community groups, et al. should be doing all they can to ensure that employers pay their workers proper wages for their work while facilitating their safe accomodation. The city borough moreover should be proactively reclaiming derelict properties in the area to make them suitable for living in. So many properties are left idle in urban spaces so fatcats can sit and wait on their arses until the area becomes gentrified and the market prices rise to line their pockets with even more profit. More expenditure from the Labour gvt. to ensure the appropriate integration amd safety of emigrants would also go a long way to improving language skills as well as workers' knowledge on labour, health, safety and accomodation rights.
So rather than prejudicially bitching about how immigrants are screwing up Hackney's comfort-laden cubicles, the media should be demanding more, better and cheaper accomodation for those who can ill-afford the high prices demanded by the market economy.
Comments
i have just read my post and i obviously was typing too fast. - Sorry :)
It always seems to end up as a battle between the have-nots unfortunately. The statistical reality in Ireland and the U.K. is that there are major shortages in the labour market and we really need such levels of immigrant labour to ensure our economies continue to grow.
The corpocratic forms of governance we are currently experiencing though prevent proper investment of human, financial and legal resources to expand labour inspectorates which would help ensure that the downgrading of wages and social benefits by nasty employers is less successful and easy to get away with.
In Ireland there are currently more dog wardens than labour inspectors.
It's not in the interest of gvts. to facilitate the recruitment of more labour inspectors as the capitalisation of industry demands lower worker wages, health and safety standards, etc. so as to make more profit for it's shareholders, which it is legally obliged to do. This is the detestablity of corporations being treated in a more sacred fashion than human beings. See Professor Joel Bakan's book 'The Corporation' for an insightful perspective on the history of corporation's increasingly comfortable relationship with gvt.s
That aside, your point is very relevant and doesn't change the fact that the local labour market also face huge challenges to pay their bills. But we can hardly blame the toilet-dwellers for that predicament.