Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by v1tyaz | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

v1tyaz

Access to the European single market and a large supply of skilled labour.

View on HN

> Access to the European single market and a large supply of skilled labour.

Membership of the EEA provides both:

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/atyourservice/en/displayFtu.ht...

"The purpose of the European Economic Area (EEA) is to extend the EU’s internal market to countries in the European Free Trade Area (EFTA). These countries either do not wish to join the EU or have not yet done so."

"The EEA incorporates the four freedoms of the internal market (free movement of goods, people, services and capital)"

Which is basically what the people of the UK chose in 1975 with the EEC, before it grew into the EU.

That's a big deal, but there could and should be free trade and labor mobility between countries whether or not those countries are part of the EU or a similar organization. It is almost guaranteed to be good for any pair of countries.

Existing trade agreements covered exports and remote labor has always been on the table.

Maybe this is getting blown up by the media, but I've seen a lot of tech people in the UK on HN and elsewhere looking (sometimes desperately) for other opportunities. Even if future agreements don't make it harder for them to remain and work in the UK on paper, it may still cause a lot of skilled labor to leave the UK purely due to perception.

That's assuming that it remains just as easy to do so, which seems unlikely given immigration was part of what was driving the leave vote. Even if it is still easier in absolute terms for someone in the EU to work in the UK than the US, the lowered differential could have pretty negative effects on the market for high-demand jobs.

Really? Because I explicitly remember that running a company and dealing with other European countries has been hell of paperwork, lawyers, different standards and protectionism which made running a company that sold goods or software across Europe extremely complicated before entry of the coutry into EU in 2004. Just the standardization of financial (global VAT system, unified taxes, etc.) and regulatory (if an item is legal in one EU country then it's legal in another) has brought so much more commerce, jobs and startups that I doubt people in this topic born after EU can even fanthom.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com