Could the scenes of chaos in the air sector have been avoided? Michael O’Leary, head of the Irish “low cost” company Ryanair, is convinced of this. On Friday, he urged the British government to show “more common sense” on post-Brexit migration policy, in the midst of a shortage of workers in the air sector. “We have this weird situation for when in the UK I can get visas to bring in Moroccans to work as cabin crew. But I can’t get visas for young Portuguese, Italians, Slovaks…” he said on BBC Radio 4.
“We need a little more common sense and a practical approach to how we implement Brexit,” he added. He said more visas for European workers would help ease disruptions in air travel.
Departing Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who led the pro-Brexit campaign, says Britain’s exit from the EU must allow the UK to move away from cheap EU workers to hire more Brits with better pay .
Record number of job vacancies
But job vacancies are hovering at record levels and companies are struggling to recruit in sectors that used to use this foreign labor, such as hotels and restaurants, distribution, agriculture, transport, etc.
They have to bring in workers from increasingly distant countries that fail to fully compensate for the hundreds of thousands of Europeans who are missing, compared to before the pandemic and Brexit.
The aviation sector in particular has been the scene of major disruptions in recent weeks, with some companies canceling thousands of flights, sometimes at the last minute, for lack of ground staff in particular.