After Brexit: British staff shortages are worsening

Whether during the harvest, in the care or behind the truck steering wheel – after the Brexit, the shortage of labor is growing in Great Britain. There are now more than a million vacancies.

Harvesting in British agriculture is still very busy until October. But Ally Capper, the owner of Stocks Farm in Herefordshire, looks back very depressed at the season. There are up to a third too few workers in the industry, and the fruits have rotted away on her farm too, she explained in the BBC – because of the shortage of staff.

“We advertised 73 harvest workers in the area, we had nine applications, of which only one woman was available who then got another job,” said the farmer. “We haven’t been able to hire a single British worker. Through intermediaries, we now have Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians, Russians, Ukrainians, very friendly, hard-working seasonal workers, not as many as we wanted, but we can handle the harvest.”

Tens of thousands of visas are not enough

The British government continues to provide a total of 30,000 visas for foreign aid workers in the harvesting sector. But that is far too little, complains Ally Capper. “British jobs for British people” – to bring one’s own workforce into one’s own labor market or to bring it back – that was a demand that always played an important role in the debate before the Brexit referendum. But the post-Brexit, post-corona reality looks different.

This is also the experience of Daniel Brown, who runs a laundry service for London hotels. He used to have 60 customers, but now he has had to give notice to some. He lacks 30 employees. And it’s not bad pay. The average weekly earnings increased from May to July by more than eight percent compared to the same period last year.

Number of employed persons at pre-crisis level

“We’re not able to find employees,” says Brown. “There are simply no interested parties because of Brexit. A room cleaner in the hotel usually got nine pounds an hour. Now 15 pounds an hour are offered and you still can’t find anyone.”

The economic recovery is progressing faster in Great Britain than in Germany, for example. At the same time, this means a record gap in vacancies: more than a million workers were urgently sought in the past three months. After a record increase in August, the number of people in employment in Great Britain is again above the pre-Corona level. According to the British statistical office ONS, it rose in August by 241,000 compared to the previous month to 29.1 million. The unemployment rate fell to 4.6 percent. According to experts, the labor shortage also contributes to faster wage growth.

“Immigration policy from an ideological point of view”

After Brexit and because of the Corona crisis, the shortage of truck drivers is urgent; there are currently delivery bottlenecks in many industries. The Road Haulage Association calculated that 100,000 additional drivers would be needed. If that does not change, prices could rise and inflation fuel. Accelerated approval procedures for drivers should now provide a remedy. But the logistics industry does not consider this to be sufficient and is also demanding special visas for foreign workers, such as the harvest workers.

Farmer Ally Capper is disillusioned with the labor shortage in many areas. From their point of view, an economic cycle that worked well in many places was sacrificed for no good reason. In every society there are jobs in hotels, laundries or in nursing, “which are not for everyone, and they are not necessarily badly paid,” she says. “So far we have had a win-win situation because we have brought people from other countries, who then used this money to build their own house in their homeland, to ensure their children’s education. We have always kept it that way as a nation, but in the meantime, immigration policy only takes place from an ideological point of view. “