‘All I want for Christmas is EU workers back’

Bloomberg

All over Europe, companies are wishing their workers a happy holiday and looking forward to a productive New Year when they return to work in 2018.
In Brexit Britain, there’s a catch. Businesses that rely on EU countries for labour are concerned that employees will return to their families in continental Europe for Christmas—and stay there.
The pound’s decline since last year’s vote to leave the EU has eroded their wages; there’s uncertainty over their legal status as Britain’s EU departure inches closer; and they may simply feel unwelcome.
It’s already happening. Over the summer, oven manufacturer Aga Rangemaster Ltd. shut its factory in Leamington Spa, central England for two weeks, as it does every year. When it re-opened, just 32 of 50 temporary workers, from Eastern Europe, came back.
“We found that most of the people were back overseas, working mostly in Germany for what is now a really high rate,” said Richard Marchington, sales director at Apex Recruitment, the consultancy Aga used to find the workers. “There’s sentiment behind it as well, which is the fact that these people feel that they’re not wanted in this country.”
Even before Britain’s scheduled departure from the EU in March 2019, Brexit’s impact on immigration is clear. Net immigration in the year through June fell by a record 106,000—data that precedes the anecdotal summer departures.
“This is not a great time of year, because people go home and they think about the future,” said Paul Drechsler, president of the UK’s main business lobby, the Confederation of British Industry. “If the future is: ‘I’m repatriating 20 percent less than I was a year ago because of the exchange rate,’ or ‘I might be out of a job in 12 months,’ they will make those sort of choices”—to leave.
“That is happening at a steady pace,” he said. “If you’re 30 years old and thinking of starting a family, you don’t tend to do it in a sea of uncertainty.”
While Drechsler praised an agreement by PM Theresa May with her EU counterparts on the rights of each other’s citizens post-Brexit, he also pointed out what May and her ministers have repeatedly stressed: that “nothing’s agreed until everything’s agreed.”
That’s helped make EU residents in Britain “a little more transient,” says Stephen Phipson, chief executive officer of the manufacturing lobby group EEF.
About 11 percent of Britain’s manufacturing labour comes from EU countries. “The fear was they’ll be going back for Christmas, and are they going to turn up again for work in January?” said Phipson. May is aware of the issue, and in a visit to Warsaw, she sought to reassure the nearly 1 million Poles resident in Britain—the biggest EU contingent—that “they are a strong part of our society, and we want them to stay.” She pledged to enshrine their rights in UK law.
One problem for British employers is that with unemployment at historical lows, they’ve come to rely on a wide pool of European labour that the government now wants to restrict. In hospitality, finding enough British workers has been a problem for decades, according to David Myskow, GM of the Holiday Inn at Kenilworth, England.