[ad_1]
UK employment updates
Sign up for myFT Daily Digest to be the first to know about UK employment news.
The British government blinked. For months, ministers refused to give in to calls from the meat and transport industries for access to migrant workers, sternly telling them they should instead increase wages and conditions to attract locals. Now, with increasing food and fuel shortages, they have promised visas for 5,000 truck drivers and 5,500 poultry workers.
Who will want these short-term visas, which expire on Christmas Eve? EU workers are unlikely to queue. As Tomasz Oryński, truck driver and Polish journalist told me: “Why would you want to go to Britain, jump all those hoops, face all this harsh environment, if you could go to Ireland or Holland and earn more, be respected, drive on nicer highways with nice truck stops and be a free European citizen and not a second-class citizen? ”
It seems more likely that visa applicants will come from further afield, if licensing rules allow. This has been proven to be the case with the UK’s ‘seasonal worker pilot’, which issues six-month visas to people to pick fruit and vegetables on UK farms. The four main source countries so far are Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Moldova. Some have come from as far away as Nepal and Barbados.
Temporary migration programs have a long history, from the American Bracero program for Mexican farm workers between the 1940s and 1960s to the German Gastarbeiter program in the 1960s. There are modern versions in Canada, New Zealand and elsewhere. Advocates say they can be a “win-win”: employers have access to workers; migrants have better opportunities.
But it’s not always that simple. It is common for migrant workers to borrow money to pay for visas, transportation and recruitment costs, making them vulnerable to exploitation. Also, unlike the free movement of labor in the EU, they are usually tied to a specific employer or recruiter, making it difficult for them to leave if they are treated badly. As a result, programs can exacerbate poor wages and working conditions in some sectors and calcify employers’ dependence on migrants. A study by the American Institute of Economic Policy concluded: “We cannot cite a historical example in which a temporary labor shortage was corrected by a temporary labor migration program, then employers have resumed hiring local workers. A favorite aphorism of migration experts is that there is nothing more permanent than a temporary migration program.
Early indications from the British pilot of fruit pickers support some of these concerns. Earlier this year, when a colleague and I investigated the project, we spoke to indebted workers in Russia and Belarus who felt trapped on farms that didn’t give them enough work, but whose recruiting would not agree to move them to another employer. And while the government still says it wants farmers to hire local workers, it has expanded the visa pilot from 2,500 to 30,000 workers.
None of this was inevitable. If the government had really wanted to improve the quality of jobs in the food and transport sectors, it could have done so independently of Brexit. He could have followed the example of the Netherlands, where employers and unions agree on sectoral agreements which set a floor on wages and conditions. It could also have strengthened its dismal enforcement of existing labor market laws.
After the Brexit vote in 2016, the government could have started planning its life without low-wage migration. He could have done everything he is currently doing in a blind panic, such as promising free training courses for heavy truck licenses. Ministers could also have tackled the power imbalance in the food supply chain which puts relentless pressure on labor costs.
No one had predicted the pandemic, which exacerbated the staff shortage, but it was not difficult to predict that action would still be needed. Two weeks after the Brexit vote, I wrote about how these sectors would struggle to cope with the end of free movement, given supermarkets’ demands for speed, flexibility and low prices. . “We wouldn’t eat without East Europeans,” the boss of a temp agency told me.
We could have stayed in the EU and improved wages and conditions in these sectors. We could have left the EU and improved wages and conditions in these sectors. But the government insisted that we would “have our cake and eat it” rather than recognize the compromises and plan for them. This has precipitated a crisis that may mean the country ends up depending on low-paid migrant workers – just different workers, who are even more vulnerable to exploitation. If there is any cake left, I don’t know who eats it.
Source link
