Labour’s Own Think Tank Warns That British Workers Will Lose Out in Jobs for 2012 Olympics
The Labour party-aligned ‘Institute for Public Policy Research’ think tank has officially warned that few local people in east London will benefit from the Olympics jobs boom in the years before 2012 and that most jobs will be filled by migrants to the detriment of British workers.
The IPPR report warned that 40,000 jobs would not be filled on building sites across the UK over the next four years. Of those, between 7,000 and 8,000 construction jobs are on the site of the £9.4 billion Olympics Games in east London.
The IPPR found that almost all of them will have to be filled by migrants, allegedly “because it would take too long to train up indigenous workers to the required standard.”
The most likely scenario was for Olympic bosses to hire the foreign construction workers in the final months before the start of the Games to make sure that they are built on time.
Most of the foreign workers will have to come from Eastern Europe or from outside the European Union.
The report found that only a tiny proportion of the building jobs will be filled with local labour, forcing construction bosses to look across the UK overseas for the necessary skills to complete the project.
There were also not enough skilled people who lived locally, with most of the jobs created “very short term in nature.”
The report said: “The host boroughs showed a marked lack of managers, engineers and other professionals, clerical workers and plumbers compared to the rest of the UK.”
It also warned that major projects in the UK in the years after the Olympics were likely to be “shifted or delayed” while “infrastructure spending in the post-Games years” would be hit because of the cash spent on the Games.
Last month it was revealed that more than 50,000 migrant workers have registered for jobs in the borough that will host the 2012 Olympics.
It emerged that Newham saw the biggest surge in new National Insurance numbers of any part of Britain since the Games were awarded to London in 2005. The 51,000 extra workers are equivalent to adding a town the size of Keighley, West Yorkshire, to the borough where the Stratford Olympic stadium and village are situated.
