Guest editor on foreign workers (The Caterer Blog)

Guest editor on foreign workers

Had an interesting chat with British Hospitality Association (BHA) chief executive Bob Cotton last week. Bob will be Caterer's guest editor on 28 June to tie in with the association's 100th anniversary.

Our meeting was to flesh out some of the ideas he had put forward for the issue. I was interested particularly on his take on what we term the skills crisis.

Organisations such as People 1st have a plan to tackle the skills crisis but Bob has his own take on the situation.

He suggests the reality is there is no skills crisis at present in the UK because the demand for workers is being met from abroad, especially Eastern Europe.

Although he doesn't blame his members for choosing this route - why employ an ill educated, unhelpful and unenthusiastic UK school leaver when you can get an educated, ambitious and polite foreign worker - he believes the approach is unsustainable.

While much will rest with the Government sorting out the schools and the types of pupils they produce for the business world, the BHA boss fears we could be heading for problems down the line and as an industry we need to take a lead on the subject.

Why with the UK economy growing at around 2% and the hospitality industry here outstripping it at around 5% growth is domestic unemployment on the rise, he asks? And is there not the potential for problems around social cohesion down the line if the pile of domestic unemployed continues to grow while the number of foreign workers making the UK their place of work increases?

Like it or not, as an industry responsible for bringing in a disproportionate amount of foreign workers Bob feels we will have to ask ourselves some hard questions about our current employment practices.

Investing in foreign workers is good business sense>>