Tales from the Indian freshie hospitality invasion

'High-skilled immigration' (sic)

‘Real.’

In the last few years, no country in the world has suffered a more severe loss of reputation than India. Yes, Russia may have invaded Ukraine and almost everyone may hate them for it, but as anyone with sense knows, it is better to be sinister than embarrassing. This loss of reputation is clearly linked to the sudden flood of poorly-educated and completely unacculturated Indian immigrants into (among other countries) Canada and the United Kingdom. The Office for National Statistics does not track the number of foreign nationals in the country, so we cannot say precisely how many Indians have come here since Brexit. Nonetheless, we know that from December 2022 to June 2023 alone, 253,000 Indians were granted long-term visas to the United Kingdom. This has primarily been driven by increases in the numbers of student visas (and visas for the dependants of students) issued since the introduction of the post-study work visa route in 2019.

‘Freshie’ — meaning ‘fresh off the boat’ — is a term that many second- and third-generation British Indians use to refer (almost always derisively) to the Indian immigrants who have arrived in Britain over the last five or so years. Regardless of what the reader thinks about post-war migration more generally, most would probably agree that there is a conspicuous difference between previous waves of Indian immigration to the United Kingdom and the most recent wave. This is partly a consequence of the enormous difference between the average Indian immigrant currently living in Britain, and the marginal recent immigrant since the floodgates were opened by Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak — a fact often forgotten by ‘neoliberal’ immigration boosters, who misleadingly point to the average wages of British Indians in an attempt to defend Rishi Sunak’s indefensible.

Although the ‘beachhead effect’ is still certainly in operation among some second- and third-generation British Indians, whereby immigrants work to hold the door open and lower standards for their compatriots, at least some seem to have become more sceptical about whether letting the freshies through the gates is advisable. Some Brits of Indian heritage, like myself, will care about the flood of freshies because it will make everyone’s lives worse, at least in the long-run, for all of the many reasons already outlined by other authors in this journal. Others are more self-interested, mainly just resenting the fact that the new arrivals are ruining our ethnic group’s hard-won reputation amongst the native Anglo-Celtic population as intelligent and hard-working. But regardless, there perhaps is more realism about the mass migration of our distant (and occasionally not-so distant) cousins than one might think.

The global Indian diaspora continues to grow apace, flooding literally any country that will allow them in. Given India’s sheer size, even with the most optimistic (i.e., wrong-headed) assumptions about immigration, the only choice available is to shut the borders, unless you are completely relaxed about creating a country that has literally nothing in common with the Britain of centuries past: India’s population can replace the British population twenty times over, and the Canadian population nearly forty times over. Elon Musk’s pro-free speech X.com has been repeatedly plastered with videos showcasing the effects of this recent influx in the West, especially in Canada. One video shows dozens upon dozens of freshies allegedly queuing for a single job in a Canadian liquor store; another shows a freshie completely unashamedly teaching his fellow immigrants how best to steal from food banks. Another video, this time filmed in London, shows a crowd of Indians (presumably mostly or entirely recent immigrants) literally shoving their way onto a bus while two whites (and one Indian) look on aghast. Can’t get to Britain or Canada? Well, how about delivering food in middle-income Armenia, just dismembered after a catastrophic war with its bigger oil-rich neighbour! You get the picture.

Of course, all international migration involves not just a ‘recipient’ country, but also a ‘donor’ country. Most ‘donor’ countries would quite naturally weigh up the long-term costs of brain drain against the medium-term benefits of remittances when considering the phenomenon of emigration. Not India: knowing that the country simply has too many warm bodies with nothing to do, India has eagerly exported its excess population, even seeking to write preferential visas into its trade agreements.

Amusingly, despite their desperation to not live in India, there is no shortage of national pride among India’s emigrants. We can debate whether the ‘rise of Hindu nationalism’ (*nods*) is good or bad for India itself at a later date. But unhelpfully for the West, this means that emigrants will often bring along with them an ideology that has helped spark sectarian havoc in British cities, especially Leicester. (And no, Tommy Robinson et al., the importation of Hindu nationalism isn’t ‘based’ just because it attacks Muslims.)

So much for the cultural effects of mass migration from India. But what of the economic effect of this influx? In Volume II (October 2023), Pimlico Journal economics correspondent Thdhmo observed:

There is plenty of evidence that while employers at the low end of the labour market can’t easily cut workers’ wages [due to the minimum wage], even when facing such a buyer’s market, they still have other ways of making workers worse off. Workers at the bottom end of the labour market have seen a sharp decline in job satisfaction since the 1990s, report significantly higher stress levels, and substantially reduced autonomy.

My own experience working in hospitality since the Indian freshie invasion points to a grim future for those working in the sector. If you are an underemployed ‘aristocrat of the soul’ (like myself, of course), or indeed if this is all you were ever meant to do with your life, your conditions (if not your pay) will get worse over time as a result of our recent lurch towards open borders with India. But as we will see, this is actually only partly due to the unusual consequences of combining a massive positive labour supply shock with a relatively high wage floor.

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Every time an employer agrees not to monitor his employees as closely as he possibly could involves an unspoken contract, founded on trust. Firstly, an employee must be competent enough to be given autonomy in the first place: he must have common-sense and be somewhat self-directed. Secondly, an employee must, to put it bluntly, not take the piss: he cannot abuse the autonomy his employer has given him by finding ways to not do the job. If all goes well, this should be a win-win; both the employer and employee will benefit. Employees are given more autonomy, more flexibility; employers spend less time (and money) monitoring their employees, which is never a very pleasant task. In some cases, performance might even improve. It is well-known that most employees who are given more autonomy, almost regardless of occupation, will report higher levels of satisfaction at work. Making this unspoken contract work on the societal level is therefore of considerable importance.

I am sure that some freshies are good employees and good colleagues. But, in general, freshies have helped undermine this unspoken contract, partly because of their sheer incompetence, and partly because of their laziness (albeit of a very specific type — more on this later). They make all the traditional, somewhat hands-off performance metrics of hospitality go haywire. According to the traditional metrics — based mostly on attendance, timeliness, and hours worked — the freshie is the best employee in the building. He always turns up, and he is never late. He works an absurd number of hours. He can be relied upon to fill in for absent colleagues at a drop of the hat. What’s not to like? One million more visas for India, Mister Rishi!

Unfortunately, any manager (or indeed firm) that bothers to look beyond these surface-level metrics will quickly find out that all is not quite right. Sure, the freshie might bother turning up to work on time, day in, day out — unlike your somewhat surly and unmotivated English employee, who will pull a sickie at the worst possible moment. But how are they at actually doing the job? The naïve assumption of most people hiring low-level service workers is that more or less anyone, barring those of severely subnormal intelligence, can be trained up to do the job fairly adequately in little to no time by throwing them into the deep end. As such, the main difference between employees is whether they actually show up in the first place, not whether they will be able to do the job to an acceptable level — hence why most current performance metrics in the industry are the way they are, based on attendance.

Don’t listen to hyperbolic IQ autists: in general, this assumption is in fact quite reasonable; well-founded on past experience. For the most part, working these jobs just isn’t all that intellectually demanding. Okay, the freshies may be downright confused by the concept of alcohol, never having been in a bar before, but surely this won’t prevent them, in time, from pulling a pint? Right…? Sadly, the freshies have thus far confounded these highly reasonable assumptions. The problems seem to be caused by apparently insuperable cultural differences as much as anything else.

What is said below is admittedly entirely anecdotal, but I think I have already seen more than enough to start drawing conclusions.

One particularly interesting feature of the freshie is a certain gormlessness; they will remain serenely unstressed even when shit has truly hit the fan. There will certainly be no sense of task prioritisation. The freshie will continue half-heartedly wiping down tables, ambling around the café at a snail’s pace when customers are waiting to order their coffee and the till is unmanned. Or while your average Englishman or Slav is smashing through half a pack of cigarettes every hour to cope with a rammed, laughably understaffed pub, the freshie will collect glasses, one at a time — for some reason, they often seem to find the concept of stacking more than a couple of glasses at once difficult and confusing, even when they are explicitly taught how (they won’t work it out on their own) — while crowds of frustrated customers rush the bar.

Perhaps it is because in India, labour is usually so cheap and plentiful that in practice, there is never any need for task prioritisation: the concept is genuinely culturally foreign to them. Or perhaps it is because, as Drukpa Kunley has observed, in the third world, people treat time very differently to Westerners: over there, time is not a precious commodity, and timeliness is not such a virtue, so why bother getting all flustered? Whatever the cause — and regardless of whether they eventually improve as they become more acculturated to British working practices — it is a nightmare to deal with as a colleague.

They are also usually bad at their job, whether that be making cocktails, pulling pints, taking orders from tables, or operating a coffee machine. There is one freshie at my bar who consistently works sixty-five hours a week (sometimes more) despite supposedly also being a ‘Master’s student’ (which, legally speaking, is also meant to limit his maximum weekly hours to twenty during university term time). Yet after all this time, he has still somehow not learned how to make cocktails or pull pints. What he has learned to do is to collect glasses and, less usefully, to spin a tray on the tip of his finger, which he is clearly very proud of and does non-stop. Despite being completely useless, he is impossible to fire because he always turns up on time and has often ‘covered’ for people.

Some employers, rather than firing their freshies and treating it as a lesson well learned, will instead try to make the best of the situation by confining them to the few tasks that they won’t make a mess of. This is far more common than you probably realise. Next time you are in a restaurant or bar, see if you can spot an unspoken ethnic division of labour. One friend once ate at a restaurant where only the English and Eastern Europeans were allowed to interact with customers directly. The freshies, not trusted to take any orders — let alone to advise on the wine list — were clearly confined to the narrow task of moving plates to and from a customer’s table. The previous bar I worked at confined the freshies to stacking the glasses into the wash and polishing them. They were not even allowed to collect glasses from the tables or to prepare fruit; indeed, it was even our job to move the glasses from the wash to the correct location. Nor was this a unique experience: almost exactly the same thing happened at the pub another friend used to work at.

At my own workplace, there is also a rule dictating that at least two people (i.e., not just the manager) must be there when opening or closing, ‘for safety reasons’. As you might expect, most English workers do not particularly want to arrive earlier or leave later, even though they are being paid to just stand around while the manager checks alarms. As such, the freshies are often used to make up the numbers to fulfil this requirement, with no expectation that they will actually do anything useful, let alone be of any help in an emergency (as is intended).

What is particularly irritating about these arrangements is the knowledge that those employees who actually do something will be paid exactly the same amount per hour as the freshies confined to washing glasses. The freshies will also be entitled to a share of the service charge (which is often tied to hours worked). In fact, overall, they may well earn more than the actually useful employees: one of the reasons that the freshie can work seemingly inhuman numbers of hours is that he is not really doing any meaningful work in the first place, and seemingly feels no stress; as such, he doesn’t get tired out in the same way as everyone else.

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If this continues, it seems almost inevitable that employers in Britain will be forced to change the way in which they interact with their employees. This will be detrimental to the quality of life of anyone working in a sector like hospitality.

Some of this might occur through deskilling. Outwardly, the spread of screens in fast food outlets and self-checkouts in supermarkets seems to be something to be celebrated. Unfortunately, upon closer inspection it seems as much to do with minimising customer interaction with employees who are often incompetent and/or speak very poor English as it is with economising on labour. McDonald’s has turned making burgers into a military operation, eroding worker autonomy completely and more or less confining each and every worker to the tiniest and most specific of tasks. Because of this combination of deskilling, monitoring, and discipline, McDonald’s has actually put the freshies to good use. The ability of McDonald’s to do this is part of what has turned it into a multi-billion dollar business — in many ways, the business of McDonald’s is in transforming some of the world’s least intrinsically valuable people into burger- and money-printing machines through good process management — but it is thoroughly unpleasant from the point of the view of the employee.

But perhaps the more fundamental way to get around the problems described above is piecework. Deliveroo is a perfect example of this: if you don’t deliver the food, then you don’t get paid. An entirely impersonal app is used to ruthlessly discipline the workers. Quite aside from the problem of pay, this, of course, is also highly unpleasant (and stressful) from the point of view of the employee, unless you are someone who greatly values the ‘on again, off again’ character of such jobs. Life’s never been good at the bottom — but it seems set to get much worse.