Young people do not support uncontrolled immigration. Very few people do. What they tend to not want is immigration being wrongly blamed for every ill.
I have also recruited, and in 30 years of doing so, I’ve never had someone say “sure, pay me half the going rate”. What I have seen is, employers asking someone what their current salary is and pitching an offer just above that regardless of what they pay elsewhere in the company. I’ve also seen hyper inflation in labour costs because of a severe shortage, as is currently the position in many areas of construction. This leads to ridiculously high charge out rates for staff. I’m negotiating a price for a major construction project right now. The charge out rate for a plumber’s labourer is £30/ph. This is the person who holds the ladder and fetches things from the van. That equals an annual amount of £58,500 per year for unskilled labour. This is repeated across almost every trade and also with construction professionals. We saw similar to this back in early 2000s, and it was only in 2004 when we began to see more European labour coming in to the country that rates paired back to where they had been previously. This remained the same for another couple of decades until Brexit happened and here we are again.
I don’t know why so few young people are shunning construction, but there is a serious disconnect with what we need in terms of resource, and how we encourage the younger generations to fill those positions. Maybe we encourage too many to go to university to study things we have less of a need for, we definitely aren’t putting as much focus on trades as we used to. There needs to be a government led review of the skills gap with a policy on how to ensure it is filled. Saying “we have more apprenticeships available” is great, but if we are training a million new mechanics when what we need is a million new construction trades, then it is pointless.
There are 750k job vacancies in the U.K. right now. 126k of those are in human health and social work. What are we doing to encourage people to those jobs? This is the care sector, who previously did those roles? Immigrants filled them but they are minimum wage jobs. The change in the number of immigrants hasn’t led to a rise in wages for those jobs, they have simply remained unfilled. I don’t think anyone should be paid minimum wage for doing that job but until the job is valued more, it will remain that way.
The current generation of young people have been screwed over. None of what is happening is their fault and no amount of shouting at them to just go out and make it happen will make any difference. The problem is structural, it is economic, and the best thing we can do is support our young people through it. Especially the bit where they are trying to change it.