“We have this weird situation at the moment where in the UK I can get visas to bring in Moroccans to work as cabin crew. But I can’t get visas for young Portuguese, Italians, Slovaks…”, he said on BBC Radio 4.
“We need a little more common sense and a practical approach to how we implement Brexit,” he said, noting that more visas for EU workers would help ease the air travel disruptions.
Departing Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who led the pro-Brexit campaign, said Brexit should allow the UK to dispense with cheap workers from the EU to hire more Britons with better wages.
However, job vacancies are fluctuating at record levels and companies are struggling to hire in sectors that depend on foreign labor, such as hotels and restaurants, distribution, agriculture, etc.
These companies thus resort to workers from more and more distant countries who fail to compensate “the hundreds of Europeans who are missing”, compared to before the pandemic and Brexit.
The aviation sector in particular has experienced scenes of chaos in recent weeks, with some companies canceling thousands of flights, sometimes at the last minute, for lack of ground staff in particular.