Marek Filipiak, a 32-year-old delivery manager at Royal Mail Plc, moved to London from Poland 13 years ago to study and stayed on to take advantage of the U.K.’s booming labor market. After the country’s vote to leave the European Union, he’s thinking about going back earlier than planned.
It’s not just the uncertainty over the terms the U.K. might impose on EU workers that worries him, or even a spate of xenophobic incidents that followed the June 23 referendum. A more important factor: the 8.2 percent drop in the British pound against the Polish zloty, which makes it harder for Filipiak to pay his mortgage on an apartment in Poland.
“It’s a disaster,” he said. “If the pound dramatically drops, I might consider going back home early and try my luck in Poland.”
By slowing the economy and limiting access to EU workers, Brexit could undermine the U.K.’s job-creation machine, which has drawn 3.2 million citizens from other EU countries -- more than 800,000 of them from Poland. The influx has surged since Poland and seven other Eastern European countries joined the bloc in 2004, giving their citizens unrestricted rights to work in the U.K.
Anxiety about immigration fueled the Brexit vote, and the Conservative Party’s contenders to replace Prime Minister David Cameron have vowed to reduce net migration from a near record 330,000 in 2015. As the Tories talk tough, U.K. employers who rely on immigrant workers are rushing to reassure them they’re wanted and needed, urging them to sit tight while the U.K. government negotiates a new relationship with the EU.

Business Letter

Five of the biggest business groups in the U.K., including the Confederation of British Industry and the British Chambers of Commerce, wrote an open letter Tuesday calling on the government to reaffirm the long-term rights of EU nationals working in Britain. Eighty members of Parliament followed with a similar plea.
“Their skills are crucial to the success of our businesses, both now and into the future,” they wrote. With the unemployment rate at an 11-year low of 5 percent, U.K. employers say they need access to the EU labor pool.
Take Mark Gorton, founder of Traditional Norfolk Poultry, which sells 30 million pounds ($39.5 million) worth of free-range poultry annually from a farm in Northeast England. More than 60 percent of his 250-person staff is from Eastern Europe, doing jobs that he says many local Britons don’t want to do: feeding, inspecting and packaging chicken. The referendum result means they don’t know where they stand.
Mark Gorton.
Mark Gorton.
Source: TNP
“I’ve got guys who have worked here for years and years, who are loyal and almost part of the family, stopping me out in the factory and saying, ‘Crikey, Mark, what do we do?’" Gorton said. “I say, ‘Hold tight, don’t disappear, we’ll be OK.’ ”
It’s these low-skilled workers from the EU who could face the tightest restrictions. If the U.K. imposes the same conditions on would-be EU migrants that it currently applies to those from most non-EU countries, very few would qualify for work visas, said Carlos Vargas-Silva, senior researcher at Oxford University’s Migration Observatory.