Are seasonal visa’s the answer to the hospitality staffing issue?
Hospitality has always been known as a job with notoriously long hours and laborious work and with the hospitality sector currently accounting for 30% of overall vacancies it seems attracting staff is one of the biggest issues facing the sector. The problem has only been compounded due by a lack of EU applicants who are struggling to obtain working visas following Brexit - So what is being done to try and tackle this problem?
To try and raise awareness and tackle some of the issues that many hospitality bosses are facing, a petition was launched by Thiago Luz Togni, a general manager at Temper in Shoreditch, London, calling for the Government to create EU hospitality worker visas. It has reached over 15,000 signatures and asks for the implementation of a two year visa, similar to the Seasonal Work visa for horticulture workers. It expresses that there is a “massive shortage of qualified labour in the UK to fill vacancies that were in many cases previously filled by EU staff”.
The growing petition goes on to explain that “for years people from the EU countries were the backbone of the hospitality industry and many were affected by Covid and subsequently by Brexit’s final terms”. The hospitality sector employs around 7% of the UK workforce, according to the Office for National Statistics. Foreign staff have historically made up more than 40% of the hospitality workforce.
A report from the Resolution Foundation said sectors heavily reliant on migrant labour tended to be lower paid and less compliant with labour rules, warning that these employers would have to do more to “entice” new workers post Brexit.
The think tank found that one in seven workers (15%) in the “migrant dense” hospitality sector reported not receiving any holiday pay, while 14% had never been given a payslip – both of which are legal rights in the UK.
Since the petition has reached over 10,000 signatures, the Government has to issue a response which the hospitality sector will eagerly await. As the petition continues to gain traction, it remains possible that it surpasses the 100,000 signatures required for the Government to debate the issue in Parliament.
The UK has a history of having high numbers of EU workers, data shows that 43,000 EU citizens received visas for work, family, study or other purposes in 2021, a small fraction of the 230,000 to 430,000 EU citizens coming to the UK each year in the six years to March 2020, according to Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimates. While that data was recorded in a time of Covid-19 Government enforced restrictions, it shows the alarmly low migrant worker levels, contributing to the lack of hospitality workforce.
However, like many other sectors, recovery begins. Since the Covid-19 restrictions were lifted, applications for work Visas in the UK have increased. There were 277,069 work-related visas granted in the year ending March 2022 (including dependents). This was a 129% increase on the year ending March 2021 and is 50% higher than in the year ending March 2020, according to data from the Home Office.
Emma McClarkin, chief executive of the British Beer and Pub Association, told the Financial Times that another remedy was to give employers more flexibility about how they spend an industry levy to fund apprenticeships, allowing them to use the money for recruitment drives as well as wages.
She added: “We have been encouraging the government to introduce more youth mobility visas to allow skilled workers to be employed from overseas, but the government must make it easier to recruit and retain staff more locally as well.”
While McClarkin has a point around recruiting and retaining local staff, the nation has become more unsatisfied with their wages. Historically, migrant workers are deemed as ‘low-skilled’ which often equates to minimum wages. Migrants earn nearly 13% less than national workers, an ILO study shows. In some countries, the gap is as much as 42%.
Over recent weeks, postal workers, Amazon and Harrods staff, train and tube staff have been staging strikes and campaigning for higher wages as the cost of living continues to soar amid rising inflation – something businesses themselves are also struggling to cope with – especially for smaller businesses facing dangerous energy price increases. It poses the question-would a EU hospitality worker visa solve the hospitality labour crisis or is even more help required to tackle problems concerning domestic workers also?
