What would we do without them Europeans comin’ over ‘ere and stealin’ our jobs?

Some personal feelings about the EU.

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May 4, 2016

London

Rather than write a long political opinion piece about the effect that Brexit would have on the UK economy or the ramifications that may cause a severe shift in the Uk’s geopolitical standing — which would all be awfully boring for everyone involved — I thought I would just give some brief personal experiences that have helped shape my own opinion on the matter.

On weekends I work at a Restaurant and Cocktail bar in West London. It is nice. Popular. Expensive. Full of posh Chelsea types who, luckily for me, spend an absurd amount of money on an average product that would be a quarter the price if it was served south of the river.

The customers are mostly English. Other nationalities come as well of course; Russians, South Africans and quite a lot of French, but probably 95% of our customers are English.

Our staff on the other hand … Behind the bar we have two Italians, a Slovakian, and a Portuguese. Our busser is Spanish. On the floor (consisting of waitresses and male-waitresses, as the bar call us), we have an Italian, a Hungarian, a Slovakian, a Lithuanian, a Spaniard and three English people. So, our entire front of house team is nine to three European. 75% EU immigrants. In the kitchen there are fourteen members of staff. All of them are from the EU. None of them are British. zero out of fourteen. 100% EU immigrants. Take front and back of house together and you have twenty-three out of twenty-six. 89% EU immigrants.

The owners are English. They have nothing against hiring English staff. In fact, when you look at how lazy and unappreciative of our jobs us three English members of staff are, they are probably biased towards hiring English staff. But English people just don’t apply for jobs at our restaurant. Two or three people come in most days to enquire after job vacancies and hand in a CV on the off chance — they are never English.

We couldn’t find another twenty-three English natives to run the restaurant if we begged on the streets of Chelsea. And if we did manage to scrape a team of natives together the service would be slow and complacent, the restaurant would be filthy, the bar would be dry and the barmen would be drunk, the steak would be overcooked and the fish would be battered, the pervy regulars would ask where the gorgeous Eastern European girls have gone and everyone else would ask why no one is doing any work. Worst of all, I would be bored.

I would be bored because my favourite thing about working in a London restaurant — hell, one of the only things I like about working in a London restaurant — is all the different people I get to work with. I love all their different traits and oddities. I love learning all the foreign swearwords from each and every one of them. I love how passionate the Italians are, how much the Spaniards laugh, how admirably stubborn the Lithuanians are and how cheeky Slovakians are. And the French, well, where do I start. I love them all, and we, in our little restaurant in Chelsea, would be absolutely fucked without them.

In future blogs I will probably come back to other reasons for wanting to stay in the EU, but for now it is enough to say that without EU immigrants the service industry would collapse and I would be bored out of my mind.