Jonathan Shainin calls this the best piece of 2017

Here is Jonathan on Twitter, and here is the LRB piece by James Meek, “Somerdale to Skarbimierz, James Meek follows Cadbury to Poland.”

The article covers the economic and sociological effects of outsourcing and wage arbitrage, and how it affects communities and politics on both sides of the investment shift.  It is hard to excerpt, but here is one good bit:

Anna Pasternak, who worked at the new chocolate factory in Skarbimierz, noticed the age of the equipment on the production lines. The wear on the metal caused by decades of Somerdale workers’ hands was the only message the British employees sent to their Polish successors. I met Pasternak in her flat in Brzeg, the nearest sizeable town to Skarbimierz. I asked her how she felt about what had happened to the British factory. ‘I never really thought about it,’ she said. ‘We lost so many jobs here in Brzeg … We didn’t feel sorry that others lost theirs … It’s somewhere else in the world. We don’t physically know these people.’

And:

Barbara Kaśnikowska, the shrewd former head of Wałbrzych zone, suggests, persuasively, that Law and Justice benefited from resentment not of the have-nots towards the haves, but between haves; that as Poland boomed, ordinary people didn’t resent those who’d become super-rich so much as people just like them who, for no good reason, earned twice or three times as much as they did. In her view, Poland’s non-voters didn’t despise Civic Platform: they took its achievements for granted. A Pole, on this analysis, is much more likely to vote to say ‘screw you’ when they are angry than ‘thanks!’ when all’s going well. You can see her point. Andrzej Buła, the marshal of Opole and Civic Platform leader in the province, told me that the EU was funding 40 per cent of the provincial budget, while unemployment had dropped from 14 to 8 per cent. In some counties it’s as low as 5 per cent – essentially full employment. Without the Ukrainians, he said, they’d be short-handed. Yet in the 2015 parliamentary elections Civic Platform lost Opole on a swing of 40 per cent to Law and Justice.

Every paraagraph is excellent, strongly recommended.

Comments

Comments for this post are closed