What can Eastern Europe teach UK industry?
06 May 2008
I met Zytronic’s new CEO, Mark Cambridge and found that things had changed all over Tyneside since my last visit.
When I met Mark Cambridge in London recently, we recalled how I had visited the company in Tyne-on-Wear a few years before. The area has always been a favourite of mine. When I was a student, a Geordie flatmate invited me to stay and introduced me to Newcastle’s nightlife. As years passed, the attraction of Tyneside became the peace of the beautiful countryside rather than the club scene but I have always had a warm welcome, whether from my former flatmate, her family and clubbers, or from companies like Zytronic.
Talking to Cambridge, it seems the welcome in Tyneside is still as warm, although it now extends beyond the ‘soft south’. Like the rest of the UK, there are large pockets of Eastern Europeans making up the workforce and often shaming the indigenous labour. The educated and skilled immigrants have settled not only in London, but also in Scotland, the East Midlands, the North-West, the South-West, and Yorkshire and Humberside.
Since joining in 1991, Cambridge has seen many changes to both the local area and his employer. In 2000, Romag Glass underwent an IPO and became Zytronic. The name for the electronics display designer and manufacturer, which produces ZyTouch, ZyPos and ZyFilm touch screen technologies, optical filters and shaped glass composites for specialised applications, came about because Zy was the most obscure prefix anyone could think of. Cambridge became CEO at the beginning of this year. Then, as managing director, he replaced CEO, John Kennair who remains at the company as chairman. Recently, a £3million factory was opened for glass sensor planing and electronics, using an existing facility, refurbished to bespoke standards.
In his own career, Cambridge has seen many changes. Initially, he wanted to study chemistry, but someone advised that material engineering graduates were in demand and so he opted for that course. After graduating, he worked at the Windscale nuclear power plant, where he had worked as part of his degree course. From there, he worked as a higher scientific officer at Atomic Energy, evaluating nuclear fuel rods before joining Romag Glass.
Today the company is a modest employer in the area, with around 190 employees on the payroll, with around 20 to 25 per cent of the work force made up of Poles, Czechs and Croatians. According to Cambridge, Zytronic’s production director recently declared that Eastern European countries joining the EU and being eligible to work in the UK is “one of the best things that has happened in the last 10 years.”
The Zytronic business is very labour-intensive, so a skilled and reliable workforce is highly prized. Around 150 people work on the semi-automated production lines and the business relies on internal training to maintain standards, says Cambridge.
This enthusiasm for immigrant workers is not unique to Zytronic. Official figures, released at the end of last year, show that 40,000 eastern Europeans have settled in the North-East since 2004. The reality is that the number could be double that, bearing in mind that not all register for work and some are self-employed. In the country as a whole, over 600,000 eastern Europeans have officially arrived and seem to be prospering. This is due to the work ethic that eastern Europeans undoubtedly have. Many people in the industry that I have spoken to have moaned about new recruits, always coming to them with problems and asking for the solution, instead of having the wherewithal to come up with their own answer. For example, a Scottish employer recruited local unemployed young people recently for unskilled (and therefore) low-paid jobs. On the first day, several did not even turn-up for work. A few days later, some had ’phoned in sick.... Over the weeks, a few more failed to show-up for work. In the end, only the Polish workers he had taken on remained, with not a sick day between them.
Similarly, ‘old’ skills are being re-introduced by eastern European workers. Also in Teeside, a fencing firm needed welders. There were some locally, but they had identified the skills shortage and were doubling their fees. Instead, Lithuanian welders were recruited, thwarting Gordon Brown’s pledge of “British jobs for British workers.” Some recruitment consultants have even spoken of an attitude shortage in the UK, not a skills shortage. Many believe that the flow of migrant workers will slow as the economies grow in countries like Poland, and migrants return. When this rate of migration slows, the UK’s skills development will become even more urgent, warns the UK’s Recruitment and Employment Federation.
So what careers advice do I give to Hayes Major and Hayes Minor when sulking over homework assignments? I think it might be: Go east [Europe], young man, go east!
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