Migrant Workers. The Parties recognise the importance of promoting equality of treatment in respect of working conditions, with a view to eliminating any discrimination in respect thereof to any worker, including migrant workers legally employed in their territories.
Migrant Workers. 3.1. In June 2009, 12% of employers said they employed or had employed in the last six months a worker who was not a UK citizen or passport holder. This is higher than December 2008, but lower than the findings from November 2007 and June 2008 (14% and 20% respectively). The likelihood of employing non-UK workers rises with the size of firm. Only 5% of small firms (2-9 staff) employed non-UK staff in the last 6 months, compared to 71% of those with 25-99 staff, and 82% of those with 100 or more staff (74). 25 20 15 10 5 0 Source: Employer Attitudes & Motivations to Learning & Training
3.2. Professional Services firms were more likely to employ / have recently employed non-UK workers (22% versus 11%) (74).
3.3. Two main reasons were given for employing non-UK workers in June 2009: that it just happened (43%) or that it was a response to skills shortages (29%). Other reasons included non-UK workers having the right skills for the job (14%) and tending to be better motivated (12%) (74).
3.4. Attitudes towards employing non-UK workers have changed since previous waves of the survey, with a large decrease in the number of employers who expect the number of non-UK will increase (down from 59% in June 2008, to 4% in August 2009). The number of employers who feel that non-UK workers are more highly skilled has halved since December 2008, from 18% to 9 whilst there has been an increase in the number of employers who felt that non-UK workers were more motivated (from 42% to 66%) (74).
3.5. The Training and Skills Needs Survey (2007) identified that of all firms with employees surveyed for this study (402), 16% reported that they currently employ non-national workers within their workforce. Employers were asked to exclude Republic of Ireland workers from their responses as the remit of the assignment was to investigate the proportion of non-UK and Ireland workers only. Based on the actual number of non-national employees, as provided by respondents, it was calculated that 5% of the total workforce of those included in the study were non-national workers. Half of all respondents that currently employ non-national workers reported that they employed Polish workers. Moreover, 27% had Lithuanian workers and 14% had Latvian workers; with the remainder coming from Slovakia, Czech Republic, Portugal, Switzerland, Brazil and Palestine (39).
3.6. For those firms that currently employ non-national workers, the primary reasons for doing so were the lack of UK workers (32%), fol...
Migrant Workers. In early summer 2007 Scottish Care began to conduct research (with funding from the Scottish Government) to look in more detail at the skills needs and nature of the workforce employed by private and voluntary providers of adult residential care services for older people. Perhaps the most surprising finding has been the numbers of non-UK nationals working within that sub-sector. At the time of writing the Stage 1 report the only available data on migrants working in the sector came from a report on the Scottish Labour Market by Futureskills Scotland (2006), which indicated that the proportion of migrants from A8 accession countries working in the care sector would be less than 5%. The Scottish Care research asked employers about migrant workers from across the EU as well as outwith it. That research covered 353 care homes for older people in Scotland, approximately 37% of all such homes, and found that the workforce within those homes included 6.1% of staff who came from an EU country other than the UK and 7.3% who were employed under a work permit. Presuming that there is no overlap at all between these groups then this would mean that 13.4%, or almost 1 in 7 of that workforce came from outside the UK. If that proportion is the same across all adult residential care services then it equates to about 6,000 workers in that sub-sector alone. The above figure is much higher than had been previously expected and as a result the SSSC has commissioned further research into the proportion of migrant workers across other parts of the sector. GEN Consulting are undertaking this research, which is also looking at the skills needs of this group of staff. The research is focussing on 5 sub-sectors, namely; adult day care; domiciliary care; early years services3; and residential child care. The final report will be available in April 2008.
