An army on the march

On 1 May bricklayers and joiners from Poland, Hungary and eight other east European countries will be free to live and work in the UK, thanks to the next round of countries joining the European Union.

The Home Office is playing down the effect EU enlargement will have on immigration, insisting the numbers won't increase dramatically from current annual levels – between 13,000 and 15,000.

But some are bracing themselves for a tidal wave of unwanted "benefit tourists". Of all European Union nations only the UK and Ireland have not imposed any restrictions on the right of new joiners to come and work. France and Germany say new EU citizens will still have to get work permits for a number of years.

This is why Migration Watch UK chairman Sir Andrew Green believes the real number of arrivals will be more like 40,000. Writing in the Daily Mail last month, he maintained that the government has not taken into account the 1.5m stateless Roma in the Baltic states.

Whatever the rate and composition of the migration, some see the UK's approach as positive for construction because it could ease the skills crisis. The CITB says we'll need 400,000 skilled workers over the next four years to build all the schools, roads and hospitals the government is promising.

On the face of it, some influx of skilled workers looks likely. Take Poland. There, a skilled plasterer earns £1 an hour. Here they can earn at least £8. There the unemployment rate is at 18%. Here construction companies are crying out for skilled workers.

Yigal Rosenberg believes there will be an avalanche. He has plenty of experience importing Eastern European workers. When Russia lifted restrictions on emigration in 1990, hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews moved to Israel. To accommodate them Israel launched a massive home-building effort. Rosenberg set up a large organisation importing skilled Eastern Europeans to build houses and blocks of flats. In boomtime he had as many as 4000 Romanians, Bulgarians, Poles and other nationals working as carpenters, bricklayers, and plasters.

Present and correct
He says these men are valuable because they are skilled and motivated: "They just want to do the hours. Working abroad for a few years they can make enough money to go home, buy a house, a car, furniture, the lot," he said. "Here we have mortgages for 20 years."

Rosenberg's company, Overseas Human Resources, is preparing to channel the new European citizens into the UK after 1 May. He tried it last year with Romanians, but getting work permits proved tricky and he succeeded in bringing only one Romanian to the UK.

Eastern European workers have a favourable reputation on their side. "They are patient, energetic, disciplined and courteous," says Mansoor Ahmed, of Totalrefurb, a small London company specialising in the high-end domestic market. One of his principal subcontractors, whom he is particularly pleased to put in front of clients, is a six-foot-five Bulgarian. "If I see Eastern Europeans I will go toward them. They are motivated and multi-skilled."

The six-foot-five Bulgarian himself, Dimitar Chardakov, is here on a business visa. He says the high wages in Britain act as a strong motivator for eastern Europeans.

"Wages are incomparable, 10 times better here, more in some case," he said. "In Bulgaria there is plenty to eat and you can go to university, but owning your own home or car or starting a business is very difficult."

Wage wars
Labour agencies expect an influx, and are rubbing their hands at the prospect of an abundance of cheap, legal labour.

"I expect we'll be inundated, and it's a benefit to me because they'll be willing to take a lower rate, say £11 or £12 an hour, so my margins go up," said the managing director of a London labour agency, adding that he has hired a Russian speaker to deal with the Eastern Europeans he already has on the books, plus the ones he expects after 1 May.

Eastern European workers will cause friction, however, precisely because they will accept a lot less in wages.

A Manchester bricklaying subcontractor said his company couldn't exploit the cheapness of foreign workers even if he wanted to. "We couldn't pay one gang X and the Polish lads Y. Our customers would cut our rates if they knew."

Unions Amicus, TGWU and GMB fear any Eastern European influx will erode pay gains secured under the National agreement. They also fear safety will be compromised with more non-english speaking workers arriving.

"It's the same old laissez-faire attitude," said Paul Corby, national construction officer for Amicus, referring to government's unwillingness to regulate who can work in construction.

George Brumwell, outgoing UCATT boss and chair of the Construction Skills Certification Scheme, agrees foreign workers shouldn't be used to undercut current wage levels, but accepts there will be a demand for them.

"Besides, they're already here," he said. He estimates that of 200,000 construction workers in London 40,000 are illegal.

Language is already an issue. Research carried out in 2003 by the Considerate Constructors Scheme showed that of 2137 construction workers monitored around the UK 13% were non-english speaking.

Contingency plans
To a certain extent, CITB-ConstructionSkills are already on the case. Last year it helped 300 non-English speakers sit the health and safety test with the help of an interpreter, and has engaged an interpreting agency who can provide companies with interpreters for any language. The CITB is also getting ready to accommodate a polyglot workforce by translating its revision book into five languages, of which the most popular is Punjabi.

The CITB has commissioned a report into how English and non-English speaking workers can best work together on site. It is due for release in the middle of this month.

Some main contractors take multi-lingual sites for granted. Bovis has produced a safety induction video in 10 languages, including Russian, Bulgarian, and Polish.

What Brumwell, CITB-ConstructionSkills and others such as the CIOB all agree on is that any workers coming in from the new EU countries should be qualified and safe. The consensus seems to be that the CSCS scheme is the best way to do this. Brumwell says the scheme is one way of ensuring that only regulated and legal workers are employed, and that the government could be supporting this position more.

"The government should make this absolute," he said. "There is no excuse for illegal labour on government contracts."

The CSCS is not yet compulsory. But despite this, and despite some protestations in the country at large about floods of benefits tourists and gypsies, the construction industry is quietly anticipating a little extra help.