Hot Features
Premium
Level up your trading with our powerful tools and real-time insights all in one place.
When Perry Como (a pre-Beatles, American crooner) sang “When the Moon Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie – That’s Amoré,” I looked up “amoré” in the dictionary and decided if that’s what love is like, I didn’t want any part of it. Of course, I was only about ten years old, so I hadn’t quite put it all together yet.
Yesterday, Great Britain’s Immigration Minister, Mark Harper, hit Domino’s Pizza (LSE:DOM); (NYSE:DPZ) CEO, Lance Batchelor, in the eye with a delivery of his own, when he responded to Batchelor’s bemoaning that he can’t find enough Brits to fill nearly a thousand current job openings. Harper suggested that Batchelor consider reflecting on the salary package his company offers. Batchelor had been perhaps the highest profile individual to make the claim that Britain’s tightening of its immigration laws was making it difficult for his company to fill jobs, especially drivers and cooks. Batchelor indicated that “Every branch in London is currently operating at less than full capacity because of the problem securing labour. In London it’s particularly difficult to get drivers and people to work in production. If we had more staff, we would spend far more on marketing and other boosts to the economy.”
He went on to describe the situation, saying that “We are asking the Government to help us have the ability to hire staff from outside of the UK and bring them in, via a properly vetted system that would ensure each individual was coming to fill a role, and would be paying taxes.” “As things stand, it’s only those with PhDs who can get into the UK. You don’t need a PhD for our work, but it is work and we need staff.”
On the other hand, Harper, is apparently so narrowly focused on immigration that he does not understand, much less care about, how his ministry’s decision adversely affect the UK economy. I should note that Bathcelor is taking the heat, but others, like Marks & Spencer, have taken the same position. At this point it looks like a Mexican standoff. Oops! Did I say “Mexican?” That makes me reflect on the US attitude: Just let them in illegally and rob Americans of jobs they could have. In the UK it’s different. The government won’t let them in to take jobs that unemployed workers refuse to take.
There is an epidemic attitude among the British unemployed whereby they will complete the requisite applications for work in order continue to claim the Jobseekers’ Allowance. Business owners know that, as long as the government is willing to pay the unemployed a handout, the unemployed are willing to stay that way. Sure, most of the available jobs are at the lower rungs of the corporate ladder, but I submit to you that the reason that so many unemployed will not take the available jobs is not that they are “menial.” It is that they are “work.” Why would these lazy blokes care a fig about working when they can get paid to stay at home?
Domino’s share price opened at 476.50, rising thereafter to 501.50 before an afternoon drawback to 494.30.
Now that I know better, I prefer the real amoré thing to getting hit in the eye like a big pizza pie. Those two things are not even close to being the same.
