[G.K Zhukov]

Originally Posted by Dante Hicks

A lot of Zhukov's argument assumes that there is mechnical / capital investment which can be undertaken. That is obviously the case in industrial (and many agricultural) jobs, but it's not quite clear that they are the jobs most immigrants actually do (in Britain today at least).

The British economy is dominated by service sector jobs and immigrants are often employed in areas where it isn't always as easy to "mechanise". Cleaners, bus drivers, waiters, etc - these jobs may one day be done by machines, but at present there is only very limited amount of capital investment one can undertake. Even with things like construction - an area which does have quite a bit of mechanisation - the remaining jobs (plumbers, electricians, labourers, bricklayers, carpenters, etc) aren't directly mechanisable. Productivity in these areas can be raised by better use of IT (e.g. PDAs for work orders) but that's not really related to wage levels (since it doesn't really replace the need for any workers).

That's a very valid argument. And yes, there is problems raising productivity per hour in services. But its not impossible, and there are also other solutions.

Lets take some examples off how it be done.
1) Construction: Pre-fabrication. Your basicly build parts of the house or the whole house on a different site and then move the parts or the house to where it shal be built. This is already common in shipbuilding.
This leads to the possibility of serial production and "indstrialization" of construction.

2) Subway, a sandwich-chain, has introduced fordism (or assembly line) in the way it's employees make the sandwich.

3) Less persons on the job. For instance in a bar etc. The bartender serves more costumers per hour. This also means that the costumer might have to wait a bit. In Norway you have to wait and the price of manual labour is high. In India you dont have to wait, and the price of manual labour is very low.