On migration, employment and community

Jesus never talked of community. Why would He?

Above is a voiceover, if you have ears to hear.

It ought to be a fundamental precept. That, if an individual’s existence, life, the fact of being here, is threatened in such a measure as to induce a state of constant fear or apprehension for one’s physical safety in one’s home jurisdiction, then other jurisdictions may offer to take in those who are thus affected. Ought to be.

Hallowe’en: get yourself a new mask

That is not cited from any refugee or asylum convention, and I am not even quite sure in my own mind what it is that separates asylum-seekers from refugees, or what separates either of those two, apparently, distinct groups from migrants, but I can compare all three to my own situation, in which I myself migrated—literally upped sticks and moved to a new jurisdiction, where, for 20 years, I slaved and contributed and integrated and organised and did what I did, for myself and my fellow communities. And I told my fellow communities where I thought they were right, and I told them where I thought they were wrong, and I yelled at them if they did nothing about being what I thought was wrong. And I paid my taxes, and I am suing the tax authority right now for treating me unjustly, and I never, ever applied for benefit or hand-outs. If I come here, I am not helpless. Because I wasn’t. I had help.

The first job I ever got after migrating to where I now am was handed to me on a plate. After nine months of whittling down to zero my meagre savings and borrowing 30,000 from a dear friend, the dear friend called me up one day and said, “Can you proofread?” (maybe because he wanted to be sure of getting his 30,000 back).

His law firm had much correspondence in English and one of the partners for whom my friend worked was (he’s retired now) a true anglophile. I went to talk to him. An interview you might call it. By me of him.

“How much work have you got that you need doing, then?”

“I’d say about half a day’s worth; what if you started with, like, three hours a day: three to six, or two to five?”

“I’m not going to sit around sharpening pencils, y’know.”

“No, of course not. Oh, I can assure you, I will have plenty of work for you!”

“Good, then let’s give it a go. How much you pay?”

“How much you looking for?”

I named my price. It’s funny: ask a lawyer to do some work for you, they’ll never ask you “What were you looking to pay?”, they’ll just name their price. Go and work for them, they won’t breathe a word of what they think you’re worth. You have to stab at their range. Pin the tail on the donkey. In the dark and blindfolded, in case you cheat.

“Two thousand an hour.” These were, it has to be said, the days of the franc, days during which I did in fact, like many in Belgium, achieve the heady heights of being a millionaire. Fifty euros to you. It was three times what I’d been paid in Germany by a law firm there, for being a lawyer. Here I was in Belgium being offered freedom, more money than I could shake a stick at, and half a day off—long lies every morning. Bliss.

Now, 30 years on, my rate has of course gone up. It’s 60 euros. And, it’ll need cutting, because business is thin. I needed to look out some old papers to prove I’ve been doing what I do for over 15 years and came across a bill charging a euro thirty-five per line of 60 characters. Those were the days. You were paid for the length of the text. So that you were paid more for consistent prevarications ominously enveloping obstreperous fundamentalist precursors than you were for Jack and Jill went up the hill, but now you’re paid per word, and they both cost the same.

A euro thirty-five for 60 characters is about 13½ cents a word, or was back in 2000, at the dawn of our new millennium. Now I charge ten or under, nearly a quarter century on. I hope you all enjoyed your fireworks when we grandiosely broke into 2000. Because the new millennium actually started in 2001, and it’s not being that grandiose for many folk, anyway.

There was one associate at the law firm who would call me when I was about to leave and ask me to come down to her office, in another building down the road. She’s a tax lawyer, and a very bubbly personality, with a mind so sharp it could split a hair. She split many a hair, but they were always pretty important hairs.

Anyhow, she didn’t write something to then have it proofread. I would sit at her computer and she would dictate in French, and I would translate as I typed. Every few sentences, I’d read it back to her, and then we’d go into discussion mode. Is it a double taxation treaty or a tax convention? What about the definitively taxed income, is that not a participation exemption? A productive learning process, with a real product at the end.

One evening, her boyfriend popped in. They were going on somewhere, and Anne-Véronique was running a tad late, but we needed to finish this job. He just stood in the corner and watched us at work. A week later, I bumped into Anne-Véronique. “How would you fancy lecturing on English writing style to Coopers & Lybrand?” Her boyfriend was one of its partners.

Life can be fortunate in that regard. I knew Fred. Fred knew Jean-Michel. Jean-Michel’s firm employed Anne-Véronique. Anne-Véronique’s boyfriend was Paul, he was a partner with Coopers & Lybrand.

Then it started. Coopers & Lybrand merged with Price Waterhouse in 1998. Van Ryn, Van Ommeslaghe, Van Beirs, Faurès & Flagey merged with Coppens and whoever. In both cases, I was with the taken-over entity. I started to get used to questions like, “And just exactly what do you do, Graham, again?”

After apparently relishing what I did for a further five or so years, PricewaterhouseCoopers decided, for whatever reason, to dispense with my services, after 17 years all told. And Coudert Brothers, as it ultimately became after a further merger, imploded in a merger negotiation with Baker & McKenzie.

What’s interesting in all this was that from 1992 to 2013, I didn’t do any job interviews. I just talked to people, they liked what I did and employed me. Not for a few months, before deciding I was no good; but for seven years, for seventeen years. All the opportunities were conveyed by word of mouth; because, in those days, there was an accountancy community, a legal community, a community of communities. Now, we have networking. A spider’s web is a net: “Come into my parlour,” said the spider to the fly.

Once the personal contacts to Fred, Paul and Jean-Michel, and others, were dispersed to the wind, life got shakier, less predictable. After proving my value for many years, the new bosses came in and wanted to know what I even did. Some were understanding. But, for others, the translator didn’t fit into a standard job description model. Translators are people outside the business. We send jobs to them that need doing. But we don’t bring them in house.

They send outside translators word lists and glossaries: not director, but board member, please; not board but board of management, not board of directors, but they’re not directors, they’re board managers. Right, got that. Next, please.

When I was at KBC Bank, they said all customers have to be clients. That felt a bit odd, and was an outlier—all the other banks called them customers, but whatever. Problem was, all the models for credit card agreements and loans, etc. mentioned customers. So every time we did some amendment work, we had to change all the customers to clients.

Then, one day, the bank’s board handed down an edict. All the clients were to be changed back to customers. Now, that is a bit silly and a bit annoying, but it’s doable. Because it’s all happening within one and the same entity. And that’s the huge benefit of having in-house translators, because they will work with you at developing house style and house terminology. What we now have with all the outsourcing that’s done is things like rejection of a translation because it uses the word director instead of board member. You don’t believe me? I am the living proof of it.

Part of the problem is that many managers never read laws. What is stated in the statute is not what people say. But what the manager wants in the articles of association is what he says, and not what the statute says, and getting them to think otherwise is an uphill struggle.

This struggle is less arduous when the guy you’re trying to convince is the guy who employed you; because he knows why he employed you: to tell him things like this. When he gets replaced, his replacement doesn’t know why you’re there, and he simply says, “Who are you to question me?” “Er, I’m the expert, actually.”

Paul told me there’s a difference between the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Finances. One’s Belgian, one’s Luxembourg. I suggested to him, “If we call them both the Finance Ministry, does that help?” It did.

These conflicts of points of view, of assertion of knowledge over knowledge, lie at the basis of our migration issues. What will the migrants do for work? How will they adapt? And why can’t Germany take more of them?

Anyone who happens into a church or talks to a priest or perchance finds themselves reading a bible will nod in sage agreement that we should all love as we want to be loved. I’ve never met anyone who contested that, though I may have encountered some who didn’t understand it. But I never met anyone who didn’t have a ream of exceptions to it.

If you accept that those oppressed in their home country should be offered a new start in your country, then you accept the principle of asylum. And if you accept that we should love as we would be loved, then that means that you must lend consideration to all the reasons why you would want to leave your own home state, and apply those to anyone who wanted to leave theirs:

- flood and tempest;

- failed crops;

- dictatorship;

- being of the wrong religion;

- having the wrong skin colour;

- not being able to find work;

- being unable to feed your family;

- pitiful education opportunities;

- death threats;

- war;

- pestilence;

- because you feel like it.

Maybe there are more, which you can add yourself: it’s your list, not mine. But, even though it’s yours, it’s the list you will also apply to me and everyone else. You will make my list, our list. And you cannot lie, because you’ll never actually send it to anyone. It’ll stay with you, up there, in your head, in your mind, in your conscience. And, if you ever challenge the right of someone to migrate, you will retrieve your list from the back of your memory and ask yourself Am I loving as I would be loved, and this time, you will cite no exceptions.

But there are those who will not relinquish their exceptions, to all sorts of things. I launched an appeal for 3,000 euros to help an African man buy a car so he can work a taxi service and keep his family from going hungry. He doesn’t even want to migrate. He loves his country, and he loves his continent, and he loves his family. He just needs a leg up. He’ll even repay what you would lend him. It would cost you nothing. And some who are anti-migrant seem also to be anti-helping potential migrants to survive where they are. And that’s not loving as you would be loved, not by a long chalk.

When Jesus said love as you would be loved, it was predicated on something that He doesn’t speak of at all, not anywhere. When Jesus doesn’t speak of something, not at any point, then it is a given. He speaks of Heaven, because He knew people didn’t always think about that. He spoke of life, because even life is not often present in our minds—crazy isn’t it? But what He never spoke about was community. Why should He? How could we love as we would be loved if there were no community? Loving as you would be loved is a precondition, and a natural consequence, of community. Without community, then all there would be, would be to love ourselves on our own, isolated from all others. And that was so obviously impossible for Jesus, that He never even uttered the word.

The community of communities I allude to above is now far less vibrant than it was when we set off firecrackers to celebrate the new millennium a year early. The business reality that is so often cited as a reason for off-handedness and peremptory decision-making in the board room has veered towards an aversion to love.

Love is for the bedroom. Love is for holding office doors open for old ladies. Love is for children. Love is for church. All you need is the Beatles. In all those cases, we love as we would be loved.

And, everywhere else, we wear a mask.