Employers of every size have gone abroad to beat skill shortages, and also to find people for lower-paid unskilled jobs for which foreign workers are often judged to have a better work ethic.

More than half the companies in the retail, hotel and catering sectors that responded to a yearly CBI Pertemps Employment Trends Survey said they had brought in foreign workers. A third of employers in construction recruited from abroad. In the transport sector, which once brought in many immigrants to fill staff shortages, only a tenth of companies hired abroad in the past year.

Employers broadened their horizons at a time when the British economy was still growing relatively strongly and unemployment had fallen to its lowest for a generation.

The surge of overseas recruitment helps to explain why the tight labour market did not bring higher inflation. The economy is now growing more slowly and unemployment has crept upwards.

The CBI argues that migration plays a key role in making the British labour market flexible and Sir Digby Jones, its Director-General, has said that Britain must send a clear message to overseas workers that their skills will be welcomed.

The expected rush to bring in people from Eastern Europe does not seem to have happened. Almost equal numbers of employers hired people from the 15 established EU states, from the new EU members and from non-EU countries.

Fewer companies actually took on people from the new EU members than they wanted to. In last year’s CBI Pertemps survey, 27 per cent expected to exploit the access of Poland and other former communist states to bring in new staff. But employers hired more new staff than expected from outside the EU.

Most of the new workers from the new EU countries were recruited as unskilled labour, especially for shops, distribution, hotels, restaurants and, more surprisingly, for manufacturing, which is still generally shedding jobs. Only a third were classified as being skilled.

The biggest group from the 15 previous EU states were professional and managerial staff. Two in five recruits from non-EU countries were unskilled. Companies appear to have had more difficulty importing skilled workers or professional and managerial staff.

Recruitment rates among the 420 private sector companies of all sizes that answered the survey are, however, still modest in bringing in migrant workers compared with the NHS. The NHS was recently going abroad to find half its new nurses and more than 60 per cent of new doctors. Most of the companies surveyed had between 50 and 5,000 employees.

One advantage of migrant workers may be that some are less likely to demand flexible working, maternity or paternity leave, which the CBI says are now becoming a greater burden on business. Nor do many expect to stay long enough to be concerned about pension schemes.

The survey, published to coincide with this week’s Trades Union Congress, finds that only 26 per cent of companies now offer employer-guaranteed final salary pensions, less than half the number of just three years ago and down from 30 per cent in 2004.

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