Filipe Graca hovered over an espresso machine at the British food chain Pret A Manger and frothed out a cafe latte for a customer. Until last year, he had struggled to find any kind of a job in his native Portugal, but when he arrived in London, he was able to work almost right away.
So were the young women from Hungary, France and Albania who cheerfully tended the cash registers. And the staff from Poland, Spain and Italy cleaning tables and preparing sandwiches for the lunch crowd. Only one thing seemed to bother them: The prospect that Britain might actually leave the EU.
“I don’t think the UK will vote for a ‘Brexit,’ but if they do, it would be bad,” said Graca, who was working to help finance his studies for a computer science degree.
“Look around,” he added, gesturing to colleagues who hailed from 10 nations across Europe. “Everyone here is from another country.”
Step into nearly any London restaurant, hotel or retail store and chances are that most people serving your meal, checking you in or ringing up your sale are not British. Peer inside a construction site, and a hive of nationalities is busy building. Even the British farm vegetables on your plate were probably harvested by European immigrants.
As Britain prepares to vote on whether to retain its membership in the EU, dire warnings have been multiplying about the punch to the British economy, and especially the vaunted financial industry, should the so-called Brexit happen. However, some of the hardest-hit businesses are likely to be in the goods and services that Britons deal with every day.
For decades, the hospitality, retail, food and construction industries in particular have taken advantage of the bloc’s rules allowing freedom of movement, meaning Europeans like Graca can work legally in any of the 28 countries that are members. Non-Europeans must obtain work visas under immigration rules that require graduate-level skills and a minimum annual salary of ￡20,800 (US$29,704).
Should Britain leave and start requiring European citizens to clear the same visa hurdles as other foreign workers, three-quarters of the 2.2 million people from other EU countries currently working in Britain would not make the cut, according to the Migration Observatory at Oxford University.
More than 90 percent of the 442,000 European migrants working at British hotels and restaurants also would not qualify.
While European nationals working in Britain make up just 5 percent of the 31.5 million-strong workforce, compared with 11 percent from overseas, they have become a visible flash point in the overall debate about whether and what type of immigration really works for Britain.
The “Leave” camp says that it has been too easy for “migrant workers” from Europe to waltz into the country and take British jobs.
“We have absolutely no power to control the numbers who are coming with no job offers and no qualifications from the 28 EU countries,” former London mayor Boris Johnson said in a recent speech rallying for a Brexit.
British businesses have faced a backlash for hiring them. Greencore, Britain’s biggest sandwich maker, drew fire for seeking hundreds of Hungarian employees for a new sandwich factory in Northampton, an hour north of London. Pret A Manger, whose outlets dot street corners across Britain, has been faulted for employing relatively few British workers.
A spokesman for Pret A Manger declined to comment.
Critics also point to the low wages that many EU workers seem willing to take in labor-intensive industries, especially people fleeing struggling economies. About 40 percent of the more than 2 million European workers in Britain hail from low-wage nations, such as Poland and Romania. And since a debt crisis struck the European south, growing numbers of Italians, Greeks, Spaniards and Portuguese have left for a chance at a job in Britain.
However, for many Europeans grateful to have a job, what is considered a low wage in the eyes of some British is better than what they would get back home.
“There are no jobs in Portugal,” said Graca, who was hoping to be promoted to barista, which pays ￡9.20 an hour, more than Pret’s base pay of ￡8.50 and higher than the ￡7.20 rate considered a living wage.
“I’m here to work and earn money,” he said.
Any “out” vote would not force Europeans to leave Britain, at least not right away. For the next two years, the British government would negotiate new treaties with the EU over labor movement and other matters.
Still, with the referendum looming, thousands of workers across the city are bracing for a potentially murky future. Employers are grappling with uncertainty about whether they will be able to hire Europeans as easily as before.
“What we don’t know is what is going to be the status of those people going forward,” said Keith Howells, the chief executive of Mott MacDonald, a major construction services firm with projects in Britain and worldwide.
About 20 percent of his workers in Britain are from elsewhere in the EU.
“Will they be welcome or not? Will they be subject to quotas or won’t they?” he said. “It’s potentially hugely destabilizing.”
That is especially true for London’s restaurants, bars and hotels, since Europeans make up most of the employees.
A British departure from the bloc “would impact the industry big time, and those who work here,” said Filippo Castellana, an Italian who manages the French restaurant Le Garrick in Covent Garden.
On a recent day, patrons were served steak frites and onion soup by staff members from Poland, Latvia, Hungary, Lithuania and France.
“We depend on European workers,” he said. “It would be insane for Britain to leave.”
Around the corner at Suvlaki, a Greek restaurant specializing in grilled meat skewers and stuffed pitas, the owner, Yannis Theodorakakos, was preparing to tally the impact if he needed to obtain work visas for the 13 European citizens working on his staff.
“It wouldn’t be the end of the world,” Theodorakakos said.
A former banker, he expects that an independent Britain would start operating like Switzerland, whose relationship with the EU is framed by bilateral treaties giving it greater control over immigration.
“But if I had to use visas in the future to hire from the EU, it would cost us money as employers,” he said.
That argument riles backers of the “Leave” lobby, who say that European citizens distort the labor market in part because they are able to come into Britain with virtually no checks and start looking for a job.
Recently, Britain’s popular curry houses aligned themselves with pro-Brexit campaigners, complaining that skilled chefs from places like Bangladesh must get expensive, time-consuming visas, while Europeans with little restaurant expertise can work right away.
A Brexit would even an unfair playing field, they say.
However, to those who claim their business could be crippled without European labor, such talk is a feeble diversion from the elephant in the room in the Brexit debate.
“The fact is we’re doing jobs that most British people don’t want to do,” said Anna Pawelec, the manager of Pillars of Hercules, a 150-year-old pub near Soho that has British owners, but is run almost entirely by Poles.
“Most of them wouldn’t get out of bed for the money we earn,” Pawelec added, standing behind a row of beer taps as the song We Didn’t Start the Fire blared from loudspeakers.
“Foreign people work hard,” she added. “We contribute hugely to this country. So everyone is thinking the same thing: Don’t tell me to leave.”
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