After our order in a leading London restaurant had been taken by a Latvian manageress and served by a Polish waiter, my observant guest commented, “With so many Eastern Europeans working in restaurants and cafes, where have all the young Brits gone?”
In fact young Brits have never been overly attracted to the hospitality industry, although the increasing number of successful British chefs is having some impact, and we have always relied on imports from Alexis Soyer in the nineteenth century to scores of smiling Australians and New Zealanders. A recent statement from the British Hospitality Association succinctly explained that it will face serious problems if it is unable to employ workers from abroad.
But to discover just how vital the British restaurant industry’s current dependence is on staff from Eastern Europe, in particular the accession states which joined the EU last year, I travelled down to Gatwick Airport to meet Antony Abel who runs Abel Staff (www.abelstaff.com), a recruitment agency specialising in Eastern Europe, from where a recent Bank of England report estimated that 120,000 new workers have arrived in the past 12 months. En route I met two more Poles, one running the drinks trolley on the Gatwick Express, and Alexandra from Gdansk, a waitress in Le Meridien hotel.
Abel’s parents came to the UK from Estonia in 1947 and he learnt Estonian before English. He then trained as a chef and subsequently ran his own recruitment business for the restaurant industry before realising that the enlargement of the EU could provide the solution to the UK’s shortage of skilled and unskilled staff.
“I went out to Tallinn and opened an office which serves as the focal point for recruiting across what was formerly part of the Eastern Bloc,” Abel explained. “And to be honest I simply had no notion of how busy we would be. The phone calls and emails from restaurateurs looking for staff in every department from chefs to kitchen porters simply never stop.”
When I queried Abel about how his company operates in Tallinn his face initially darkened as he replied, “I will tell you what we never do and that is to take money from someone who is looking for a job. We are paid by the employers in the UK, but unfortunately there is such a shortage that there are some extremely unscrupulous practitioners out there who take their money first and never deliver. We had to rescue a couple of Estonians not long ago from Luton who had been sent to an hotel that simply didn’t exist.”
Instead, once the vacancy is put on to their website there is an instant, significant response, roughly 100 applicants for each job. The Tallinn office then selects the most appropriate and, while allowing the employer to go out to interview or do so by phone or webcam, it checks criminal, medical and driving licence records, and assesses and grades their English.
But although he is paid by the employers, Abel kept referring to the employees as his ‘clients’. “We make sure that every employer can offer their new staff decent accommodation, that their terms and conditions of employment are fair and that they have an up to date HR policy.”
Once the ‘clients’ arrive at Gatwick, Abel’s corporate role becomes that of chaperone. “We meet them at the airport, provide them with a British SIM card for their mobiles and ensure that they get on the right onward transport for their final destination. It is an enormous shock for many of them just arriving at Gatwick so for the first few weeks we have to act as a kind of welfare state.”
A year into this new and rapidly expanding business Abel has no doubts about how beneficial this new source of labour is for all concerned. “They come to work here with a 12 month contract and have no intention of settling. They are all very proud of their own countries and want to return, but this move is a logical, short term step whether they are middle aged and need to pay for someone’s education or young and want the experience and the opportunity to better their English. They have already shown that they are prepared to work hard because they will have come over with a couple of hundred pounds to see them through to their first pay day and that requires considerable dedication given the rates of pay over there. And when they are here they want to work as much as they can. They don’t mind working the Friday and Saturday night shifts which chefs invariably find so difficult to fill.”
Finally, Abel cited the example of Chris Walker at The Masonic Arms in south west Scotland who was so happy with two Lithuanian waitresses that he has just hired two Estonian chefs, Hoger Talvik and Angelina Glusenkova for the sauce and larder sections. Despite faltering English, Glusenkova explained that she was very happy after her first month, delighted with the first night’s dinner in the restaurant she had been treated to and most proud to be wearing the tartan chefs’ trousers Walker had bought for her and her colleague.