Only a few weeks ago did the company find a candidate, in Portugal. CH2M Hill quickly made plans to bring him north — no visa or work permits were required, thanks to a European Union policy that allows the free flow of labor across the borders of the 27-country bloc.

With signs that Britain might seek an exit from the European Union, businesses like CH2M Hill are starting to focus on what they might lose in the labor force if the country does leave.

For non-Europeans, securing a work permit can take three months, so the labor law is a huge help, said Michael I. Glenn, CH2M Hill’s director of international operations.

“These programs and projects that we do are of a scale that we have to move our expertise around,” he said.

Continental Europe provides a nearby pool of potential employees with the qualifications needed to work in Britain, added Andrea Laws, the company’s director of international recruitment.

Britain, with 61.9 million people, has about 40.6 million people of working age. But together, the 27 countries in the European Union, population 494.9 million, represent a labor pool of about 329.7 million. (Only citizens of Romania and Bulgaria are restricted from working freely in Britain, and they will gain that right in January when temporary restrictions imposed by Britain lapse.)

Despite Britain’s unemployment rate of 7.8 percent, many businesses say that without access to the European Union’s labor pool, filling all sorts of jobs would be difficult, either because they cannot find enough people with the right skills in Britain or because there are some jobs that Britons are reluctant to do.

A report this month from the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry concluded that Britain’s leaving the European Union would directly affect “firms’ ability to do business,” “their access to skills” and, therefore, the British government’s tax revenue.

The report also said the 2.2 million European Union immigrants were “much more likely” to be employed and less likely to be reliant on public welfare benefits than either British citizens or immigrants from outside the European Union.

But as in the United States, where immigration legislation has been hotly debated for months, migrant labor remains a contentious issue in Britain. A growing populist force, the U.K. Independence Party, blames Europe for allowing hundreds of thousands of workers outside the country to settle here.

“The business perspective, broadly speaking, clashes with the No. 1 concern about the European Union from the public,” said Mats Persson, director of Open Europe, which favors a looser relationship between Britain and the European Union.

British opponents of open borders point to the large influx of workers from the former Communist states of Eastern Europe in the last decade. When Poland and seven other ex-Communist countries joined the European Union in 2004, the British government underestimated the scale of migration and chose not to impose temporary work restrictions.

Yet in the chamber report, a director of a promotional merchandise company said “a number of our suppliers use Polish or Baltic workers to do quite menial tasks because they cannot get local people to do them.”

Big British employers of foreign labor include service businesses like hotels because, the report said, part of the problem with such sectors “is their poor image and the belief that they do not offer career progression opportunities.”

Still, many British business leaders criticize what they consider meddlesome employment rules by the European Union, like rules on maximum working hours and workplace rights for staff members on temporary contracts.

But the European Commission takes a different view. To expect access to the European Union’s single market without abiding by its social and employment legislation is “not realistic,” said Jonathan Todd, a commission spokesman.

For many employers, the advantages of a Pan-European work force outweigh bureaucratic vexations.

Consider Z-Card, which sells information and advertising materials mostly in the form of pocket-size foldout cards. The company is privately held, with annual revenue of about £6 million, or $9.3 million, and has a staff of 34. Only 16 are Britons. The rest are mainly from other countries in the European Union.

While Britain is the company’s biggest individual market, 70 percent of its business comes from other European Union countries, with clients like the German airline Lufthansa and the Vatican. (Z-Card produced a foldout brochure of tourist information for the Vatican Library.)

The likelihood that a Briton could have secured the Vatican contract, the company’s managing director, Liz Love, said would have been “absolutely zilch.”

For CH2M Hill, which has 28,000 employees and made $7 billion in revenue last year, the hiring challenge is less a question of culture than of capabilities. Needing to recruit at least 500 people in Britain this year for construction jobs it has already won, the company is constrained by a shortage of engineers, partly because engineering has not been a popular field of study in the country’s universities.

Ms. Laws said the company was in a global “war for talent.”

Construction booms in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America are pulling experienced engineers away from Europe, she said.

Mr. Glenn said the European Union not only enabled CH2M Hill to hire for Britain from the Continent but also let the company easily move employees to other European countries once projects were finished. That helps it retain skilled engineers.

“The skills base we are talking about and the scale of the programs require us to be able to move folks around,” he said. “The visa issue is significant.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/business/global/british-firms-see-value-in-continent-wide-labor-pool.html?partner=rss&emc=rss