Foreign technicians taking British jobs

LONDON, Jan. 5 (UPI) -- A job recruitment expert says a policy allowing foreign specialists to work in Britain is being abused by companies to bring in lower-level technicians.

"Intra-company transfers," which allow British subsidiaries in other countries to send workers to Britain, "are being done on an almost industrial scale," said Ann Swain, chief executive officer of the Association for Professional Staffing Cos.

The government's Home Office said 45,000 foreign workers took technical jobs in Britain last year, 70 percent of them from India, The Times of London reported Tuesday.

The program allows companies to skip advertising for job openings in Britain if they offer the job to foreign workers who have worked at a subsidiary for at least six months. The foreign workers can stay in Britain three years and possibly extend that to five years.

"It seems extraordinary that when British workers can't find jobs we are bringing foreign workers from halfway round the world," Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister, said. "This is another sign that Gordon Brown's 'British jobs for British workers' was a meaningless soundbite."