Are They Finally Leaving the UK?

At last a balanced article about foreign workers. The Financial Times writes that overseas workers are more likely to keep their jobs during the recession than the UK-born ones, partly due to the foreigners' willingness to work harder.

"Roughly the same proportion of British nationals and foreigners are unemployed - one in 12 - but joblessness among Britons rose by 600,000, or 43 per cent, in the past year compared with a rise of 16,000, or 15 per cent, among foreign workers," research done by the FT shows.

One of the reasons, according to the article, may be that the non-British workers who couldn't find work anymore just upped and left.

Yet another may be that different categories of people – such as contractors or the self-employed – from Eastern Europe are not entitled to unemployment, thus being left out of statistics altogether.

And last but not least, it may be that Eastern Europeans in particular are famous for their total disregard for lunch and tea breaks and their modest claims in what concerns working conditions and shifts.

Not that that's a good thing.