Peter Walker, Thursday 21st June 2012 22:26
After 15 years in recruitment, Alison Andrews, who runs an agency for temporary staff in Somerset, has some strong views on UK workers.
"I don't take the British applications very seriously, to be honest," she said. "Before I recruited foreign workers I only used to recruit English people. Then, people used to tell me so many lies, all the time, about why they didn't want to go to work. Every day at 6am my phone would be ringing with company bosses screaming at me because no staff were there.
"I'd knock on people's doors and they'd say, 'Oh, my gran died in Liverpool', or 'My goldfish is dead', 'I've got a headache'. Every excuse you could possibly hear."
Such sentiments are not uncommon in job agencies, particularly those that specialise in factory and food work, where labour demand is variable and geographically shifting, and conditions often arduous.
The head of another agency, Southampton-based Workforce Plus, run under the slogan "Polish recruitment by Polish recruitment agency", is at pains to stress that his clients never specifically request staff by nationality, a legally murky request. But, since his company advertises only on Polish language websites, it has, he says, only a handful of Britons on its books.
"There is a different cultural attitude to work in Poland," says the man, who asked not to be named. "In the UK there is that tendency for people to say, 'Ah well, if things don't work out the state will look after me'. People don't have that attitude in Poland."
Such attitudes, critics say, jeopardise the employment prospects of British nationals through cheap stereotyping. There are, of course, more prosaic factors at play. Andrews specialises in finding staff in skilled manufacturing sectors such as sewing and upholstery, and argues that the UK simply does not train enough workers in these areas. "We teach things like hairdressing, and then engineering, but nothing in between. We seem to be missing out on the people who can make things."
She also echoes the point made regularly by economists in examining the popularity of migrant labour: if people have moved abroad purely to find work, they will generally move again to secure it: "The foreign staff are transient, they don't mind going where work is. That's the beauty."
What seems undeniable is that such agencies sometimes use these differences to denigrate British staff. "Those [from the UK] on the temporary employment register are there for a reason, usually negative," wrote Chris Slay, director of another firm, Skills Provision, in a newsletter to clients. "They are generally poor quality workers looking for a tick in the box to get government assistance."
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