Brexit and your role - what are your burning questions?

Hi Steve
My concern is being able to continue to recruit people from the EU. There has been a lot of talk about "talent", minimum salary levels etc, but what if you don't want "talent"? What if the majority of your employees have for some years come from the EU and you worry where they will come from if you are no longer able to recruit them because of a salary threshold?

For context, this is manufacturing, but I know other sectors recruit EU colleagues so may have similar concerns.

Thanks, Annabel

Annabel, you raise an excellent question concerning (presumably) unskilled, low-cost labour, which I think in terms of answers has been swept under the carpet for too long by the powers at be......
If you cannot demonstrate a specific skill need, then I suspect that your answer will have to take the form of offering an improved package that local labour is willing to accept.....
I'm very interested to see how this one pans out and feel for you !

Apart from the points already mentioned I would be interested in any upcoming changes regarding contracting/self-employment for people living in the EU and providing services to a UK company.

I’m in the same situation as Annabel and would welcome information on this

I'm in exactly the same position Annabel. At least 90% of my employees are from the EU. We recruit mainly unskilled labour and train and develop them. All of my now semi-skilled staff and operational management team have been developed from within and 'started at the bottom'. I'm in food manufacturing and its a massive concern. We are trying to invest in more machinery (where we can) which will remove some head count however we still rely on a large number of unskilled and semi skilled labour. A points based immigration system will just not work for our industry.

Hi Annabel, Tracy

There are a couple of ifs to consider in addressing this question.

If you know you are going to hire from the EU and the role is relatively permanent (rather than say seasonal), our recommendation to employers is to bring them in ahead of 31 December 2020 and help them to apply for pre-settled status.

If the employment is going to be more on a temporary basis or otherwise not expected to qualify under the minimum threshold, post-31 December, the route will depend on the other visas available under the new immigration system. CIPD has been feeding into the work of the Migration Advisory Committee as well as the Home Office and we have been pointing out the need for employers to have continued access to skills and labour at all levels and not just at the high-end. The focus of our most recent calls are around extending the proposed temporary visa from one year to two. Obviously this hasn't resolved yet but we do encourage members to support our conversations with government on this.

Derek

Thank you for your support Ray, however you make an assumption which unfortunately many people do, and I worry will be the Government's default... We currently pay all Production Operatives £8.50 per hour regardless of age... So quite above minimum wage. Despite this we still rely on EU labour. It is not therefore a question of paying better. Of course I could say, let's massively increase this, but we are a narrow margin business, this would be passed to our customers, who wouldn't be willing to pay it, we'd go bust and then no one would be paid anything...

Hi Derek. We have fairly high turnover, we can't just hope that people will stay for ever if they join us before 31st December.

We know there are going to be more than a few organisations facing the same predicament - that's why we've been vocal in our engagement with policy makers on this point.

But from a people practice point of view, an earlier post from Laura hits the nail on the head and underscores some of the things we've been saying to our members on workforce planning (whether Brexit-related or more generally). We can't ultimately control whether someone will leave or stay, but if employers are putting training, development, progression into their employee proposition, they will at least have done what they can to give employees incentives to stay. For the really low-skilled work, it may be that automation for example should be part of the conversation.

The trouble is Derek that even with doing all that, our staff turnover is really high. I'm responsible for 3 production facilities and our lowest turnover is 50%. Of course we are trying to do more to reduce this, however it isn't easy. We also aren't in a position to put our pay rates up, as we can't pass this on the customer (retailers and food service) who of course are also facing the same challenges.